Download THE PHILOSOPHIES OF HISTORY OF HERDER AND

THE PHILOSOPHIES OF HISTORY OF
HERDER AND HEGEL
A Thesis Submitted to the College of
Graduate Studies and Research
in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Master of Arts
in the Department of Political Studies
University of Saskatchewan
Saskatoon
By
Clare Thérèse Pellerin
© Copyright Clare Thérèse Pellerin, March 2005. All rights reserved.
PERMISSION TO USE
In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for a Graduate
degree from the University of Saskatchewan, I agree that the Libraries of this University
may make it freely available for inspection. I further agree that permission for copying of
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whole or part should be addressed to:
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ii
ABSTRACT
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Johann Gottfried Herder unwittingly contributed to
the political strands of Marxism and Fascism, respectively, but also to the gently
progressing secularisation of Christian values that pervades the contemporary age. While
Herder conceived of God traditionally, as a transcendent Being, he also sowed the seeds
for Hegel’s philosophy in which God is realised immanently through the development of
man’s full capacities for reason. Since Hegel also posits that the end is implicit in the
beginning, his scheme cannot hold without the kind of necessity that comes from a Godly
(transcendent) source. At the same time, Hegel’s philosophy of history as revealed in
The Phenomenology of Spirit and Herder’s Another Philosophy of History contain
remarkable similarities that show how Herder’s and Hegel’s quest to reconcile the earthly
and the finite with the infinite and the eternal led to the secularisation of philosophy and
the beginning of the modern cultural ethos. The reader should see how Herder struggled
to reconcile the many competing viewpoints of his age with his awareness that these
viewpoints were limited, and how Hegel subsequently attempted to address this
conundrum, along with the fundamental philosophical and theological question (left
unresolved by Herder) of how man can have free will under God. The reader should
realise how God’s immanence in man, partially accorded by Herder, and more
substantially accorded by Hegel, leads eventually to the secular perspective of modern
times, with both its negative, totalitarian and extreme manifestations, and its positive,
pseudo-Christian and mildly socialist outcomes.
iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to thank Professors Allan MacLeod and Ria Jenkins of St. Thomas
More College at the University of Saskatchewan for their guidance and inspiration.
Thank you to the other Advisory Committee members, Professors Bohdan Kordan and
Michael Pomedli, for their helpful comments. The author would also like to thank her
husband, Daniel Pellerin, for his encouragement and revisions, as well as her parents,
Daniel and Dorothy Pellerin, and siblings, Joël, Nora, and Antoine, for their support.
Thank you to Grammie for her indispensable generosity and kindness. Thank you as well
to the other grad students (Rachel, Gerelt-od, Sean, Niki, Bill, Stacey, and Jesse), to the
secretary and potter, Lorrie, and to the incomparable Anna Hunter, all of whom made our
time together in Saskatoon quite memorable.
iv
Let the other sciences try to argue as much as they like without philosophy – without it
they can have in them neither life, Spirit, nor truth.
G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface, §6
TO DANIEL
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PERMISSION TO USE............................................................................................ii
ABSTRACT.........................................................................................................iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS......................................................................................iv
DEDICATION........................................................................................................v
TABLE OF CONTENTS..........................................................................................vi
INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................1
I HERDER’S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: REVELATION BY FORTGANG RATHER
THAN FORTSCHRITT...............................................................................11
II HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: REVELATION OF ABSOLUTE KNOWING,
OR “COMPREHENDED HISTORY”............................................................45
III GOD IN HISTORY...........................................................................................64
CONCLUSION.....................................................................................................83
BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................................................................90
vi
INTRODUCTION
What if we were one day to arrive at a perspective that
would allow us to survey the whole of our species? [To
see] how far the chain will reach that was at first drawn so
slowly between the peoples and continents, but that then
wound its way through the nations with so much clanking,
and that would finally, gently but firmly bind, draw
together, and lead away these nations – whereto? Then we
shall see the ripe harvest of the seeds that we dispersed
among the peoples through a blind sieve and whose strange
shoots, manifold blossoms, and ambiguous promises of
fruit we once observed. Then we shall get to taste for
ourselves what delicacies were finally brought forth for the
universal education of mankind by the cloudy, unsavoury
leaven that has been fermenting for so long.1
Herder is a thinker known for his defence of nationalism and his concern for the
cultural ethos of nations; Hegel is known for his holist and supposedly teleological
interpretation of history. There is a basis for these interpretations, but close investigation
of these thinkers’ philosophies of history yields a deeper understanding of their role in the
history of thought, and by extension, in history itself. Herder and Hegel stand opposed
on one central question: the precise nature of the role of God in history. This question is
the hinge for what has turned out to be the most defining feature of the modern age, the
secularisation and politicisation of Christian values — political changes that on the
1
J.G. Herder, Another Philosophy of History and Selected Political Writings, trans. Ioannis Evrigenis and
Daniel Pellerin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 97. Henceforth cited as Herder, AP.
1
surface oppose (orthodox) Christianity, but that in fact reflect some of the Gospel’s
messages into the political realm: moderate, non-coercive Socialism to complement the
already prevalent right to property (the “greatest commandment,” that “thou shalt love
thy neighbour as thyself” [Mark, 12:312]); the abolition of capital punishment (“He that is
without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” [John, 8:7]); tolerance, even love,
for those who were previously considered “outsiders” (“a light to lighten the Gentiles,
and the glory of thy people Israel” [Luke, 2:32]); and openness to those who were
previously considered “sinners” (“I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to
repentance” [Luke, 5:32] — as long as their sin is not intolerance itself).
The Gospel contains messages that are paradoxical, which is why it has also
historically been the basis for a hypothetical separation of Earth from Heaven, if not
always a real separation between church and state. In the past, the values that best served
the Church’s political ends on Earth were promoted, while the aspects of the Gospel that
did not do this were neglected (“call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your
Father, which is in heaven” [Matthew, 23:9]). The modern age has rejected those values
that maintained the political domination of the Christian churches and that kept society
enthralled to certain notions of morality that had in fact been pilfered from the ancient
Greeks and Romans (vestal virgins, sacrifice, valour of the soul in battle against the
enemy — in the Christian case, against Satan), and adopted the other, more strictly
Christian values that were sometimes promoted by figures such as St. Francis of Assisi.
This political manifestation of secularised Christian ideas is perhaps not quite what
the Christ Himself had in mind (“render therefore unto Caesar the things which be
Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s” [Luke, 20:25]), but represents the
natural evolution of ideas that were first revealed long ago, that have taken on many
forms across history, and that invariably will shift again in ways that contemporary
people would not understand.
2
The Bible, Authorised King James Version. This version will be cited henceforth.
2
Herder and Hegel are linked to the two trends that have most vociferously opposed
this secularisation of Christian values: Fascism and coercive Socialism.3 While the
Communists took to heart the idea that all humans should be treated equally, they
subjected every aspect of existence to this (excessive) rule, blinkered by utopian
yearnings. This meant that political murders and executions became as common as bread
was scarce, while the numbers of people killed directly under Communist governments in
the twentieth century are estimated to approach a hundred million.
In the meantime, the Fascists killed millions as well, sometimes under the rubric of
“racial superiority,” by making use of national aspirations for domination. The Fascists
entertained both secular and pseudo-Christian values, depending on which were more
useful to them, while the Communists were strictly anti-religious. It is curious that both
groups made ample use of aesthetics, symbolism, and demand for dogmatic fealty in a
manner obviously inspired by the most fanatical religious and imperialist regimes of the
past. Furthermore, while at the surface level these two extremist groups were each
other’s worst enemies (since they were invariably each other’s most brutal enemies), both
of their forms of coercion really opposed the same thing: the gradual secularisation of
Christianity that has become the new ethos of the Western world. Both Herder and Hegel
can be linked tendentiously to the National Socialists and to the idea of coercive
Socialism that emerged within Hegel’s lifetime.4
3
The opposition of the extremist doctrines of Fascism and Communism to the modern ethos is described
succinctly by W.B. Yeats in the poem “The Second Coming,” where he writes: “The best lack all
conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.” This poem also echoes the theme of
Revelation so prevalent in Herder’s and Hegel’s work. (William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” in
The Works of W.B. Yeats (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1994), 158.)
4
Marx was a disaffected student of Hegel. Barnard writes: “Herder’s interest in politics was but an aspect
of a much wider interest which encompassed not only art and literature but also a distinct cosmology and
philosophy of history. For it was this close association of political, historical, poetical, and religiocosmological thinking that was to characterise the comprehensive, ‘ideological’ style of political thought
from the Romanticists to the Marxists.” (F.M. Barnard, Herder’s Social and Political Thought: From
Enlightenment to Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 31)
3
At the same time, these two thinkers stand at the turning point of the question of the
secularisation of Christianity.5 They offer a unique view on the most important debate of
the modern age by seeking to reconcile the concrete and the abstract, the subjective and
the objective, the particular and the universal, the real and the projected.6 They are
equally concerned with exploring the role of each cultural ethos in history and finding a
framework for explaining the development of humanity in time. Herder and Hegel show
us what answers someone from their complex period in history might give to the
fundamental questions of where we come from, what we should do, and where we are
going.7
For both these thinkers, the Enlightenment represents a focus on universalism that is
empty and disconnected from the real world. Instead, the course of history is to be seen
as an organic whole that unfolds through a dialectical process, rather than a constant flux
that must be reined in by an imposed universal. Herder and Hegel are sometimes viewed
as heralds of the Romantic era that was to follow the Enlightenment in Germany.
However, while both of these thinkers had a very specific perspective on God’s role in
human history that did not match orthodox views of God, neither did they espouse the
subsequent pantheistic position that held that God is merely immanent in mankind and in
the natural world, a position later popular with the Romantics.
The position both thinkers held of God as transcendent-immanent is important
because it imbues human existence and history with divine meaning. To posit God as
transcendent is not to acknowledge the human side of the responsibilities that come with
the capacity to reason. To posit God as immanent is merely to embellish human
existence and history with a flourish of “Spirit.” To think of God as simultaneously
transcendent and immanent is to take on a burden of responsibility that makes human
5
Barnard explains of Herder: “[F]ew of his predecessors went to such lengths as he did in bringing down
the divine to the human level, or, more precisely, in denying the existence of any dualism or antithesis
between the religious and the secular realms.” (Barnard, 88)
6
Barnard mentions that Herder advocated “a most subtle and careful synthesis between the ‘objective’
material and the ‘subjective’ ordering of it into a coherent and intelligible account.” (Barnard, 111)
7
Hegel’s philosophy of history is often interpreted to be teleological, but for the purpose of this thesis, the
less evidently teleological Phenomenology of Spirit will serve to demonstrate the links between Herder’s
and Hegel’s thought, and to illustrate the more profound aspects of Hegel’s philosophy.
4
action on Earth and throughout history much more important. It is to link human reason
to a source that awaits our response, our use of the very gift that makes us so different
from the other animals: it is to measure our ends against the possibility of a greater,
invisible end, and thus to force adjustments and improvements in our ways and
institutions according to what we gradually observe to be true about the world and about
human beings within it.
This shift from a focus on the division between Heaven and Earth towards the
significance of earthly achievement and improvement is one that is obviously connected
to the process of secularisation that has occurred in the modern age. Herder and Hegel
questioned the orthodoxies of their own time very consciously, but it is almost certain
that they would have preferred for their philosophies to reinforce and strengthen
Christianity and belief in God rather than erode them. Historically, Herder’s influence on
the Romantics and Hegel’s influence on Marx and Engels meant that their philosophies
would be instrumental in unleashing the forces of secularism and historicism in the
world. Herder and Hegel are inextricably linked to the great competing philosophies of
the modern age, but their holist perspective remains unique even among all the clashing
ideas it has fathered.
The attempts Herder and Hegel made to reconcile free will to the notion of a
traditional God in Herder’s case, and to that of a guiding principle and Spirit in Hegel’s
case, introduced the immanent argument into philosophy in a way that made it
historically and politically relevant. If the responsibility to bring about goodness and
wisdom in the world lies somewhat in the hands of human beings, why could it not lie
entirely in human hands? According to Herder, our earthly wanderings would culminate
in the traditional second coming of the Christ. According to Hegel, the human trajectory
would conclude with the same inevitability, although one derived more substantially from
human action. From Hegel’s inevitable end to the formation of the human Spirit, the
transition to Marx’s inevitable end of human history with its hostile exclusion of
traditional religion is an easy one. It is a question of harnessing the philosophical and the
5
spiritual to the purposes of the practical; a question of dissolving the esoteric into mere
earthly material and closing minds against the open possibilities that remain when any
transcendent element is still taken seriously. It is also, in terms of politics, exceedingly
dangerous.
What political theorists often overlook is that, although it is true that secularisation is
a beneficial counterweight when balanced with fanatical religion, extreme secularisation
is bound to leave the spiritual needs of populations unanswered. This creates powerful
vacuums that can only be filled with political ideas and expectations even more intense
and virulent than those introduced by religion — as the history of the past century has
surely borne out. The religious horrors of the past, though gruesome, pale in comparison
to the blood-spilling of twentieth-century philosophies, and to the indifference to human
life that is bred by the notion that all earthly problems can be definitively resolved by
human means.
Secularism in the political process is greatly to be desired, as it enables people of
divergent faiths (and the non-faithful) to interact without any presumption of belief or
creed. Secularism in juxtaposition to religion in the public realm is also to be respected,
for it tempers the tendency of believers to seek to resolve questions haphazardly and
without the humility wrought by the wonders of science and the incompleteness of
human knowledge. It is when secularism itself becomes a creed and a boundary that no
one dares to cross that it becomes dangerous; it is when secular existence is deemed to be
the only valid form of existence that it makes itself oppressive to the human imagination
and to the life of the Spirit. When secularism closes off more pathways than it opens, it
has become too heavy for its own purpose, clogging the corridors through which the
human Spirit breathes and inviting a sickness worse than the one it is meant to heal.
From this angle, Herder and Hegel are partly responsible for the cultural turnaround
that would bring both moderation and excess to the fore; hope for a better way of life and
abuse of life for the sake of ideology would proceed simultaneously from their
philosophical influence. What was to come of the ideas they provoked they could never
6
have imagined, nor tolerated. Where Herder and Hegel were seeking the whole, Marxists
and Fascists sought to cut the notion of “the whole” down to a size more easily
governable on Earth: to break down what little knowledge we have into certainties and
order life according to them. Although the intentions of these subsequent philosophers
and politicians may well have been pure, they also stemmed from what Herder and Hegel
would deem to be madness, as a will violently to reorder the universe must seem to
philosophers whose life work consisted in observing life around them with care and
wonder.
The first chapter explores Herder’s philosophy of history, demonstrating that the
prevalent interpretation of Herder as a primarily relativist thinker is too one-sided. The
aspects of Herder’s thought that link him most clearly to Hegel and to the fundamental
undercurrents of the secularisation of Christian thought are far from relativist. The work
of Max Rouché will be juxtaposed to Isaiah Berlin’s more standard interpretation of
Herder as a thinker whose main contribution to modern thought is his relativism. In fact,
Berlin himself acknowledges having read Rouché’s work, La Philosophie de l’histoire de
Herder, calling it “[t]he best discussion of this topic known to me.”8 Herder’s notion of
“progression” rather than “progress” (Fortgang rather than Fortschritt) is also important
for understanding his influence on Hegel, as well as his role in forming the German
national consciousness. Herder and Hegel reject the idea that “progress” occurs
historically in a visibly straight line,9 choosing instead to build a more realistic basis for
8
Isaiah Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment,” in The Proper Study of Mankind, ed. Henry Hardy and
Roger Hausheer (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1997), 361.
9
Herder writes in Another Philosophy of History: “That this growing up, this progression from one to the
other is not ‘perfection in the narrow sense of the schoolhouse,’ this, I reckon, our whole examination has
demonstrated.” (Herder, AP, 68). Daniel Pellerin also writes: “Herder’s overarching objective, in
Another Philosophy of History especially, is to expose the childishness of believing in ‘beautiful
progress’ along ‘a nice straight line’ defined by the chimerical ideals of the philosophers.” (Daniel
Pellerin, “A Note on the Texts and the Translation,” in Herder, AP, xliv) Compare Herder: “[T]he
philosopher is most like an animal when he wishes to be most like God” (Herder, AP, 70) and Hegel’s
chapter entitled “The spiritual animal kingdom and deceit, or the ‘matter in hand’ itself” and sometimes
referred to as “The spiritual animal and its humbug,” in which individuality, knowing itself to be all
reality, will “begin with a result,” and in which the moments comprising the movement of this
consciousness merely get “dissolved in the universal ‘matter in hand.’” (G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology
of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §234-251. Henceforth cited as
Hegel, PhG.)
7
their organic and holist understanding of the development of history. This basis for
understanding history is subtler than that of other philosophers and allows them to refrain
from forcing events into an arbitrary, pre-conceived historical system.
The second chapter will discuss Hegel’s philosophy of history as derived from the
Phenomenology of Spirit,10 emphasising the ways in which Hegel drew on Herder’s
work. The theme of Revelation11 is vital for understanding both the development of
Herder’s thought and the inspiration for Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The
foundation Herder and Hegel both seek for building their respective concepts of
Revelation is that of reason. This is the new foundation introduced by the thinkers of the
Enlightenment; one that will situate Herder and Hegel’s philosophies on the outer
boundaries of the realm of Christian thought, positioning Hegel’s construction, in
particular, where it can easily be claimed by either the orthodox Christians or the
secularists. This is the last fortress of Christian thought before the landscape of
existentialists and Marxists rolls out, interrupted only by the unusual outposts of thinkers
like Kierkegaard. Herder and Hegel reject the views of orthodox Christianity but do not
stray into the shoals of pantheism: they steer a careful course between the dangers and
conceive an interpretation of God’s relation to history that is at once non-dogmatic and
optimistic.
In the third chapter, the question of God’s role in history is discussed with an
emphasis on the transcendent-immanent conception of God that Herder and Hegel
champion. The renowned fog of opacity surrounding Hegel’s religious position is
dispersed somewhat when Herder’s influence is considered: Hegel defines his position
largely in relation to that of thinkers like Herder and Schleiermacher. Hegel’s unusual
notion of God merits investigation because, neither transcendentalist nor pantheistic, it is
10
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit will be the primary source rather than his Philosophy of History
because it is in the Phenomenology of Spirit that Hegel’s philosophy of history is unveiled at its most
profound level; the level at which the subject is no longer enslaved to the object, so to speak.
11
The word “Apocalypse,” derived from the Greek and used as a title for the New Testament book that
records the revelation granted to St. John, means the same thing as the word “Revelation” itself, which is
an unveiling, “[a] striking disclosure of something previously unknown or not realised.” (Oxford English
Dictionary, Second Edition)
8
easily misunderstood. The idea of the organic whole of human existence is emphasised
by Herder in Another Philosophy of History. Although this idea has antecedent sources,
it is Herder’s version of organic wholeness that glimmers through the pages of Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit. Holism also leads to the notion of necessity that makes its
appearance in Herder’s later work, and that is so vital for Hegel’s understanding of
history.
Herder’s philosophy is notoriously self-contradictory, perhaps because his enemies,
the Aufklärer, had so many different positions themselves, all of which Herder intended
to oppose at once.12 This tension in Herder’s thought was fertile ground for the ideas of
Hegel,13 who seems in his Phenomenology of Spirit to have answered the question Herder
asked at the beginning of this introduction.
The significance of Herder’s and Hegel’s philosophies of history for the development
of political thought is substantial. The mould for the political philosophies of Marxism,
Existentialism, and secularism is already being forged when Herder tries to explain the
reality of God’s existence in conformity to, and simultaneously in violation of, the norms
of Enlightenment thought. The unity that Hegel makes of all aspects of existence
(political, historical, social, physical, and metaphysical) inadvertently becomes the
original mould for the secular political philosophies that would soon adorn the gallery of
nineteenth and twentieth century thought. At a more fundamental level, the development
of humanist thought that defines the political boundaries of the modern era cannot be
understood without the link to the Christian morality that preceded it and that constituted
its genesis.
12
13
Max Rouché, La philosophie de l’histoire de Herder (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1940), 317.
Beiser observes “that historicism was not born with Hegel. Indeed, from his early life and the writings
we can now see how much he learned from the works of Montesquieu, Ferguson, Herder, and Spinoza.”
(Frederick C. Beiser, “Hegel’s Historicism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. Frederick C.
Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 272). Guy Planty-Bonjour argues that both
Herder and Hegel elaborated Montesquieu’s notion of the general spirit of a nation (Guy Planty-Bonjour,
“L’esprit général d’une nation selon Montesquieu et le ‘Volksgeist’ Hegelien,” in Hegel et le siècle des
lumières, ed. Jacques d’Hondt (Vendômes: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974), 7), while Ioannis
Evrigenis points out how Herder’s philosophy of history “set the stage for subsequent historical thinking,
and [how] its influence on Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche is only the most noticeable evidence of its broad
effect.” (Ioannis Evrigenis, Introduction to Herder, AP, xxxix)
9
CHAPTER I
HERDER’S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: REVELATION BY FORTGANG
RATHER THAN FORTSCHRITT
Herder’s Another Philosophy of History can easily be interpreted as a relativist work
insofar as it argues for tolerance of different cultures and against cultural hegemony and
conquest. But it is important to recall that Herder based his interpretation of history on a
specific viewpoint that is more fundamentally responsible for the ideas behind intercultural tolerance than mere relativism, namely that of Christianity. While some strong
historical strands of Christianity have long advocated (and sometimes continue to
advocate) an attitude of superiority and staunch, unthinking certainty, other strands have
long been the source for ideas of tolerance and large-scale ecumenism. It is necessary to
distinguish between the idea that all tolerance stems from complete relativism, and the
one that tolerance can go hand-in-hand with committed beliefs, and in fact can originate
with them. Although many would like to think that the modern Occidental world exists
despite Christianity, it in fact exists because of Christianity: many of the secular,
relativist values that are taken for granted today represent the tail end of a seldom
conscious struggle to distil the ethos of Christianity. Herder’s Another Philosophy of
History is an interesting study in this vein, one that emphasises the very concern Herder
had with preserving the Christian ethos. Another Philosophy of History could be said to
10
contradict some of Herder’s later works, such as the Letters towards the Advancement of
Humanity and the Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, which are
positioned in favour of the values of the Enlightenment. These values are expressed in
the two later works as a movement towards “humanity,” as in “humaneness” or
Humanität. In reality, though, Another Philosophy of History precedes Herder’s other
works quite naturally: within it, Herder’s commitment to Humanität is forged at the
spiritual level, just as the values of the Enlightenment themselves evolved from within
the Christian ethos.
During the Enlightenment, many philosophers believed that a linear “Progress”
(referred to by Herder as Fortschritt) was occurring in history, leading, of course, to their
own illuminated era.1 But in Herder’s understanding of Fortgang, virtue never increases
from nation to nation, nor do passions wane: they only change shape. Where other
philosophers, including Hegel, deem their own context the most propitious for the proper
understanding of history, Herder doubts that any nation or epoch can have access to the
“full view” of the meaning of history.2
Rather than obvious Progress throughout history, Herder sees a slow and quiet
progression, “in a higher sense than one has been imagining;” one in which each of
“life’s different ages” contains “the centre of its happiness within itself. The young man
is not happier than the innocent, contented child, nor the calm old man unhappier than
the vigorously striving man.”3 Herder disagrees that Progress brings about the greater
happiness of human beings, but also condemns the alternate view in which there is “[n]o
plan! No progression! Eternal revolution – weaving and tearing up! Penelopean
1
Herder is especially uncomfortable with the pride and self-righteousness shown by those thinkers living in
his age. He writes: “These people are like the Chinese, who, because they knew no one else, considered
their country the square of the world, and who painted the corners of this square with hideous grimaces
and monsters that were supposed to portray us, the pitiful inhabitants of the rest of the world. We laugh
at the Chinese, and yet how often does it seem like one were [living] in China when one hears the
opinions of persons who know the world only by the corner in which they are stuck and by the Hamburg
Correspondent.” (Herder, AP, 103)
2
Herder, AP, 72.
3
Herder, AP, 31.
11
labours!”4 Instead, “true progression” is Herder’s Fortgang, a walking forward that
contrasts with the harried “Progress” or Fortschritt discerned by Enlightenment thinkers:
a measured stride that continues “for [God’s] satisfaction, perhaps for [God’s] enjoyment,
not for yours.” Herder suspects that the meaning of history, its full view, “must lie
outside the reach of mere human beings.”5 It could be said of Herder’s scheme of
progression that it occurs “behind the back” of human consciousness.
In Another Philosophy of History, Herder uses the image of the tree to depict the
evolution of nations. This image is used alongside the allegory of the ages of man.
Herder links the simple, faithful existence of the “patriarchs” to the childhood of man,
and compares it also to the first growth of the great tree of humanity, the “old cedar”
whose roots sustain “the whole young forest with their sap and their strength.”6 As the
tree grows, the Egyptian boy begins his schooling, and his civilisation abandons the
nomadic life for one of “fixed abodes” and “property in land.” The Egyptian schoolboy
learns “diligence” and “civil loyalty,” while “paternal oracles of the deity” are replaced
with “laws” and “political rules of security.”7 The Phoenicians form the link between
Ancient Egypt and Greece, a link enabling the world to become “wider, the human races,
more connected and closer.” It was “Phoenician liveliness and intelligence, a new kind
of comfort and commodious living, the transition to Greek taste, and a kind of study of
peoples” that led to “Greek freedom.”8
Herder recognises that his own age was beholden to the Ancient Greeks9 who,
nonetheless, even to Herder, represent beauty and youth. Greece, for Herder too, is “the
cradle of humaneness, of friendship between peoples, of fine legislation, of all that is
most agreeable, in religion, customs, prose, poetry, common practices, and arts. All this:
4
Herder, AP, 30.
Herder, AP, 72-73.
6
Herder, AP, 5-11.
7
Herder, AP, 11-16.
8
Herder, AP, 16-18.
9
Herder writes to this effect, “[W]e will know and appraise you [properly], you Greeks and Romans, only
after the spirit of excessive adoration has been dampened and the bias sufficiently tempered that leads
everyone to caress [his] favourite people like a Pandora.” (Herder, AP, 79)
5
12
the joy of youth, grace, play and love!”10 This blossoming of the tree is followed by the
expansion of its branches under the direction of the Romans. This development
represents the “manhood of human strength and striving.” The divisions between nations
were eroded as Romans “trod” through the provinces, imposing their “laws, ideals of
propriety, virtues and vices.” It was at this stage that the “trunk of the tree, having grown
to its greater height, strove to take the peoples and nations under its shadow, to turn them
into branches.”11
The next historical development of note is the conquest of the Romans by the
Barbarians, which is for Herder a fresh beginning: the tree under which “[p]eoples and
continents” had lived was condemned by “the voice of the holy watcher,” who cried
“Hew it down!” For Herder, “Nothing less than a new world was needed to heal the
[resulting] tear.” This section of Another Philosophy of History is more elaborate than
the previous ones, depicting a simultaneous fermentation and growth, for the new world
of Christianity will be “mixed up with the dough of peculiar, utterly diverse, and often
the most odious ways of thinking.”12 Although Herder’s organic images might be taken
exclusively as symbols of the unity of the whole picture, Max Rouché cautions that they
are in truth “meant to underline the equal necessity of all civilisations, not the progress of
the whole.”13
The question arises whether Herder intends to portray his own era of the
Enlightenment as the epoch of world history corresponding to senility. This is what is
implied when Herder writes that in his own age, “one thing chases after another like one
water bubble racing to destroy another,” while “relations are so often unbalanced
between power and prudence, competence and cleverness, disposition and a good heart
10
Herder, AP, 18-21.
Herder, AP, 21-23.
12
Herder, AP, 32-45.
13
Rouché, 107. Compare Herder: “That human being striving upward! He has to pass through life’s
different ages, all evidently in progression; one striving after another, continuously; between each of
them are apparent resting places, revolutions! Changes! And yet each has the centre of its happiness
within itself!” (Herder, AP, 31)
11
13
— all of which invariably characterises an age of decay.”14 Later, he intimates that the
prophecies of the Biblical Revelation will soon come to pass when he writes:
“Philosopher: if you wish to honour and put to use the height attained by your age, the
book of [its] prehistory lies before you! Secured with seven seals, it is a wondrous book
of prophecy: the end of days awaits you! Read!”15
It could be argued that Herder’s relativism threatens to unravel his whole philosophy
of history, which is mainly stitched together by his belief in progressive Revelation.
Where Herder sees various nations and periods in history as “both means and end,”16 as
each having the “centre of its happiness within itself,” he can be taken to mean that
morality and “the good” is relative, when in fact he only means that happiness is relative.
Herder is trying to deflate the self-centred philosophy of the Enlightenment, and in his
enthusiasm, he seems to tip the balance in favour of relativism. Herder writes for
instance in sarcastic imitation of Enlightenment thinkers:
How wretched [the time] when there were still nations and national characters: what
mutual hatred, aversion to foreigners, fixation upon one’s centre, ancestral
prejudices, clinging to a scrap of land upon which we are born and upon which we
are to rot away. [...] Thank God that all our national characters have been erased!
We all love each other, or rather, none of us needs to love any other. We interact
with each other, completely indifferent to each other, mannered, courteous,
blissful!17
Herder abhors the thought that Europeans would bestow upon other, more “childlike”
nations their “philosophical deism, [their] aesthetic virtue and honour; [their] universal
love of all peoples full of tolerant subjugation, blood-sucking, and enlightenment
according to the high taste of [their] time.” According to Herder, this would be to “rob [a
14
Herder, AP, 4.
Herder, AP, 74. Herder makes reference to Revelation, 5:3. Compare Herder: “Most of the driving
forces behind our politics have already been made to condemn or despise even calm wisdom, and [we all
know] how ancient are the reproaches and scruples to which the conflict between Christianity and the
ways of the world has given rise on both sides! Since weakness cannot end but in weakness, then, and
since the excessive straining and ill use of the last reserves of waning strength can hasten nothing but
complete collapse – but it is not my place to prophesy!” (Herder, AP, 91)
16
Herder, AP, 43.
17
Herder, AP, 65.
15
14
child] of his better inclinations, of the bliss and foundations of his nature,” to turn him
“into the most monstrous thing in the world: into an old man of three years.”18
Taken to the extreme, Herder’s argument that all nations are centred on themselves
and cannot be judged by any independent standard means that there cannot really be a
philosophy of history beyond the discovery that there cannot be any philosophy of
history. History would simply be described, and no judgments over whether certain
events in history were abhorrent would be permitted. This entangles Herder in the same
web as Hegel, who has been accused of engaging in a mode of thinking that may well
lead either to an outright rejection of history, or alternately, to a “passive acceptance of
reality, to a consecration of all injustices.”19 But Herder also argues that these discrete
ages of humanity are unified by “true progression, progressing development,” which
“enters into the great,” becoming “something of which the history of empty hulls boasts
so much and of which it shows so little: the stage for a guiding intention on earth!”20 At
the same time, Herder sees a broader picture than other philosophers of his age in that he
questions the self-importance of any people, including that of Enlightenment Europe:
Is not everything a means towards a million ends, everything an end by a million
means? The chain of omnipotent, omniscient Good contains thousands of entwined
meshes: every link of this chain hangs in its proper place as a link, yet none can see
where the chain [as a whole] hangs in the end. Each feels itself, in its delusion, to
be the centre point; each feels the points that surround it only insofar as it directs its
rays or waves upon them. Fine delusion! But the great line that encircles all these
waves, rays, and seeming centres – Where? – Who? – Why?21
Isaiah Berlin’s interpretation of Herder is the one most accessible to the Englishspeaking world, and the one generally responsible for placing the emphasis on Herder’s
relativism. Berlin discusses Herder in his essays “The Counter-Enlightenment” and
“Herder and the Enlightenment,” both included in The Proper Study of Mankind. Berlin
focuses on the antagonism Herder felt towards the Enlightenment thinkers and their
18
Herder, AP, 11.
Rouché, 124.* (References marked with an asterisk are translated by the author of this thesis.)
20
Herder, AP, 31.
21
Herder, AP, 72.
19
15
conception of universal values. For Berlin, what is most important in Herder’s work and
what greatly influenced the tone of European thought was Herder’s relativist view of
human culture, in which each cultural group has its “centre point” and can only flourish
within its own gravitational sphere. This is doubtless one of the aspects of Herder’s
thought that is worth investigating, and one that will appeal the most to many
contemporary thinkers. As F. M. Barnard points out, while Herder’s theory of social
development is teleological, its teleological elements are conceived in a strictly relativist
sense: “The telos was not held to lie beyond human ‘striving’ but within it.”22 In the
same way, Hegel, even more than Herder, will find meaning within the sphere of human
actions.
So long as only the relativist aspect of Herder’s and Hegel’s thought is pursued,
however, there is no way to determine what human beings should seek. If every culture
stands on its own centre, warrior cultures are presumably just as valuable as peaceful
ones, and members of cultures that condone human sacrifice in astonishing numbers (like
the Aztec, for instance) are no more misguided than members of cultures in which killing
is avoided in ritual proceedings. According to Berlin, one cannot determine conclusively
what is a better way to live. Herder would argue there is no clear “best” way, but would
he claim there is no “better” way? That is unlikely, and Berlin unfortunately avoids
investigating this second, monist strain within Herder’s thought.
Herder is not a relativist thinker who despairs of the search for truth, concluding that
human beings cannot determine how to improve themselves, or how to uncover the good.
To ignore the constructive portion of Herder’s philosophy is to ignore the holist
dimension of his thought that is crucial for understanding the depth of Herder’s
philosophy of history and for understanding the connections between Herder’s and
Hegel’s thought. Although Berlin does not carry out this analysis, he does observe that
Herder “attempted to construct a coherent system to explain the nature of man and his
22
Barnard, 150.
16
experience in history.”23 Berlin hints that Herder’s pluralist thought is bound up with his
whole view of history as a vessel for the variety found on earth, and yet mistakenly hails
Herder as a supporter of his own scheme in which there is only “a plurality of
incommensurable cultures.”24
In the end, Berlin attributes to Herder a “doctrine of the indivisibility of the human
personality” and of “pluralism and the doctrine of the incompatibility of human ends.”25
That Herder scorned the lumières of the Enlightenment, however, does not mean that he
would tag along with the equally dogmatic pluralists of the modern age. Even Berlin
recognises that Herder by no means rejects the “universally valid goals” of “reason,
freedom, toleration, mutual love and respect between individuals and societies, as well as
physical and spiritual health” and “finer perceptions” — all ideals contained in Herder’s
notion of “Humanität.” But where Berlin claims that Herder does not use these ideals as
“universal criterion either of explanation or of value,” 26 and that for Herder different
types of “human essence” are “unbridgeable,”27 he is avoiding the question of Herder’s
faith. Berlin concedes with Max Rouché that Herder’s works “bristle with
contradictions,”28 but it is Rouché who fleshes out these contradictions with the most
care: Berlin is limited by his insistence on Herder’s fundamental pluralism.
To his credit, Berlin acknowledges that he is passing over the facet of Herder’s
thought that relates to Hegel’s philosophy most clearly: “I shall necessarily have to omit
much else that is relevant and interesting [in Herder’s thought],” including “the use made
of his imprecise, often inconsistent, but always many-faceted and stimulating thought by
such writers as [...] Hegel (whose concepts of becoming and of the growth and
personality of impersonal institutions begin their lives in Herder’s pages).”29
23
Berlin, “The Counter-Enlightenment,” in The Proper Study of Mankind, 253.
Berlin, “The Counter-Enlightenment,” in The Proper Study of Mankind, 255.
25
Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment,” in The Proper Study of Mankind, 417.
26
Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment,” in The Proper Study of Mankind, 411.
27
Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment,” in The Proper Study of Mankind, 432.
28
Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment,” in The Proper Study of Mankind, 432.
29
Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment,” in The Proper Study of Mankind, 361, footnote 2.
24
17
Since Berlin wishes to highlight what he finds original in Herder, he chooses not to
investigate Herder’s use either of “[t]he ancient notion of a single great cosmic force of
nature, embodied in finite, dynamic centres” or of “the idea of a divine plan realised in
human history,” which Berlin associates with the Old Testament and with many
subsequent sources.30 Berlin even comes close to finding the central link between Herder
and Hegel when he acknowledges how Herder’s Fortgang does imply “qualities that are
universal in man,” suggesting that “one culture can study, understand and admire
another.” Berlin admits that Herder conceives of God’s role in destiny in a similar way
to Bossuet, and also links Herder’s historical “drama” to “the world spirit come to full
self-consciousness of itself, in Hegel’s famous image.” Berlin contrasts Herder insight
with Hegel’s: “Life is not a jigsaw puzzle of which the fragments must fit into some
single pattern in terms of which alone they are all intelligible, so that what seems, taken
in isolation, irrational or ugly, is seen to be an indispensable ingredient in the great
harmonious whole.”31 But Berlin does not see how the layers of Herder’s “symphony,”
the movements of which develop each according to their own “ends” and “values,”32 are
reliant on the omniscience of God, who sees all that man cannot see; nor does he
recognise how Herder’s “enthusiastic acceptance of the findings of the natural sciences”33
in fact complements his faith, since he regards reason as a special gift for man whose
potentialities must be unfolded, and science as a demonstration of that reason. While it
may be true that, for Herder, “[o]ne culture is never a mere means to another,” Berlin
extrapolates mistakenly from Herder the notion that “men are never means to ends
beyond themselves.”34 Herder answers him:
You insect on the ground, take another look at heaven and earth: do you find
yourself to be the exclusive centre and end of all the simultaneous motion in the
universe, dead and alive; or are you not yourself contributing (where, why, and when
30
Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment,” in The Proper Study of Mankind, 364. Berlin focuses on three
aspects of Herder’s thought: populism, expressionism, and pluralism. It is questionable whether these are
in fact totally original in Herder’s thought, as Berlin claims.
31
Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment,” in The Proper Study of Mankind, 410.
32
Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment,” in The Proper Study of Mankind, 410.
33
Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment,” in The Proper Study of Mankind, 432.
34
Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment,” in The Proper Study of Mankind, 407.
18
– who ever asked you this?) to higher ends that remain unknown to you – ends to
which the morning-star and the little cloud by his side are contributing, as are you
and the worm that you are just stepping on? All this is undeniable and inscrutable in
the great, all-encompassing, all-uniting world of a moment: in the great allencompassing world to come, in all the occurrences and further developments of the
human species, in that drama full of the wisdom and the knots of its creator – can
you expect anything less or different?35
For Herder as well as for Hegel, the individual parts are made essential by the whole.
Berlin is right, however, to note that Herder’s nationalism never became virulent or
political and that he kept “the peculiar brand of universalism with which he had begun”
over the span of his intellectual career, whether or not these two strains in his thought
were consistent with one another.36 Berlin also remarks in this vein that Hegel never lost
his “loathing for all forms of collective emotional afflatus,” which permitted him to avoid
the irrational patriotism of some of his contemporaries.37 Herder, who reviled rabid
nationalism, nonetheless differed from Hegel in that he was keen not “to think, but to be,
feel, live!”38
Herder and Hegel diverge considerably in their style. Herder, as Berlin points out,
did not categorize and felt no urge to “reduce the heterogeneous flow of experience to
homogeneous units, to label them and fit them into theoretical frameworks in order to be
able to predict and control them.” Berlin observes that other thinkers might be “logically
more gifted” than Herder,39 and Hegel is an obvious example of such a case. What is less
obvious in the light of their different styles is that Herder and Hegel have much the same
philosophy of history and way of perceiving the world. This is well expressed by Herder
when he muses: “I am not sure that I know what ‘material’ and ‘immaterial’ mean. I do
not believe that nature erected iron walls between these terms... I cannot see them
anywhere.”40
35
Herder, AP, 73.
Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment,” in The Proper Study of Mankind, 371.
37
Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment,” in The Proper Study of Mankind, 371.
38
Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment,” in The Proper Study of Mankind, 258.
39
Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment,” in The Proper Study of Mankind, 370.
40
Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment,” in The Proper Study of Mankind, 370, 379.
36
19
Hegel echoes this disdain for the boundaries men perceive between the thing-for-us
and the thing-in-itself, or between the real world and the inverted world.41 This points to
the core of Herder’s and Hegel’s philosophies of history: that no superficial structure
imposed by man encapsulates the depth and breadth of life, or of actual history; and that
the concrete, the manifold in history takes its course within the infinite possibility of
human consciousness as it is defined by Spirit, or by consciousness. The philosopher’s
role is to assess history as reasonably as possible from the perspective of the spirit of his
time, to be the owl that flies over the past ages and surveys them as well as he can from a
dusk-obscured bird’s-eye view. Herder doubts that a philosopher can see very far down
the chain of life, as when he claims to be “barely a single letter” in the “great book of
God that extends over all the worlds and times” and insists that, looking around, he “can
scarcely see three more letters.”42 But in Another Philosophy of History, Herder arguably
attempts to look down the chain in the very way that he considers impossible, and in a
manner that Hegel later refines.
In contrast to Berlin’s interpretation of Herder’s philosophy of history stands that of
Max Rouché, who took some twenty years to write a voluminous assessment of this
aspect of Herder’s thought. Rouché does not dwell on the relativist phenomenon within
Herder’s work, although he recognises it as one of the relevant strands for discussion.
For Rouché, there are other important elements at work in Herder’s scheme, and while
Rouché points to the inconsistencies therein, he also acknowledges that said scheme is of
one whole piece: Herder’s Christianity offers a context in which to reconcile
Enlightenment and relativism, reason and feeling, nationalism and the recognition of all
peoples as human populations worthy of respect. It is the framework of gradually
progressing Revelation that allows Herder to check the enthusiasm of his fellow
Enlightenment thinkers while simultaneously presenting a subtle approach to the
understanding of history’s progression. What little man knows of his own past points, as
41
42
Hegel, PhG, §132-165 (“Force and the Understanding: Appearance and the Supersensible World”).
Herder, AP, 97. Herder asks: “[W]ho am I to judge, when I am just crossing the great ballroom and
eyeing some far corner of the great concealed painting in the dimmest of lights?” (Herder, AP, 96)
20
far as Herder is concerned, to a meaningful process. Rouché’s attack on Herder’s sundry
logical dilemmas is fierce, but allows him to depict Herder’s thought with more breadth
and less bias then Berlin. As far as Herder’s nationalist relativism is concerned, Rouché
insists that Herder was far from being the only philosopher of his time to question the
ravages and abuses perpetrated by colonial powers. But there is a second impetus for
Herder’s relativism: his urge to defend German language and culture against the
unrelenting flood of French culture.
Rouché, like Berlin, points out that within Another Philosophy of History, Herder
contradicts himself continuously, as when he begins by execrating the thinkers of the
(early) Enlightenment43 and arguing that 18th century Europe is in a state of decline, and
ends by claiming that European culture is superior to others in its science, art, and morals.
Herder mocks for several pages the notion that technical improvements have benefited
Europeans or increased European virtue, only to argue in favour of these improvements a
few pages later.44
It is also true that Herder never explains the details of his interpretation of history as a
gradual Revelation, perhaps because that would involve admitting there is some truth to
the philosophies of the Enlightenment. Herder ends up having equally to condemn and
praise tradition, since he is arguing at once for Revelation and for the relative happiness
of nations. Where Herder hesitates between the cult of nationalism and the ideal of
“humanity” is precisely where he also admires the Romans for having united large swaths
of people while simultaneously despising them for having built an Empire.45
As for Herder’s important sources, Rouché suggests that Leibniz and Justus Möser
both influenced Herder’s understanding of history as a continuous unfolding that never
43
Herder makes very clear his intention to heap “burning coals [...] upon the heads of [his universalistic
age].” (Daniel Pellerin, “A Note on the Texts and the Translation”, in Herder, AP, xlix)
44
Rouché, 118.
45
Rouché, 118-119, 122.
21
moves in leaps or bounds.46 Leibniz may also have inspired Herder’s organic metaphor
in his Fragments:
With the origin of a thing escapes a part of its history that must nevertheless
explain so much about it, and usually its most important elements. As the tree
begins from its roots, so art, language and science grow from their origins. The
seedling encloses the plant with its parts; the spermatozoid the creature with all its
members; and in the origin of a phenomenon is found the treasure of explanations
that makes their commentary genetic.47
From here it is not a long way to Hegel’s Preface, where he writes:
The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that
the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is
shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now
emerges as the truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one
another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same
time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not
only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this
mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole.48
Three of Leibniz’ principles take centre place in Herder’s philosophy of history: the
principle of continuity, the principle of specificity, and Leibnizean optimism. The
principle of continuity applies to Herder’s dismissal of the notion of a hierarchy between
different cultures and epochs. The principle of specificity applies to Herder’s
dismantling of theories of “Progress” and to the stress Herder places on recognising the
originality of each culture and time. The principle of optimism applies to Herder’s theory
of a Revelation through which man comes to know God and reality, and comes to acquire
reason through history, through time.49
Also, Herder owes partly to Montesquieu his portrayal of climate and geography as
important factors for the formation of a people – an observation that originated with
Aristotle. Although both Montesquieu and Herder condemn generalities, it is Herder who
46
Rouché, 22. F. M. Barnard comments that “[w]hilst the English and French brand of the Enlightenment
inclined towards a more positivist, empirical and utilitarian attitude, the leaders of the German
Enlightenment continued to build on the natural law tradition of Pufendorf and Thomasius and on the
rationalist philosophy of Leibniz.” (Barnard, 7) Herder resembles his Enlightenment peers in this respect.
47
Rouché, 22.*
48
Hegel, PhG, §2.
49
Rouché, 113.
22
purposefully tries to avoid using a system to explain historical development.50 Of
Montesquieu, Herder writes:
He has provided such a fine example of how to gauge everything with two or
three words, how to lead on everything towards two or three forms of government
whose origin and whose strictly limited scope and timelines are readily visible.
How pleasant, nonetheless — and this, too, is fate — to be able to follow him, in
the spirit of the laws of all times and peoples, as he moves beyond the confines of
his own people! One often holds the ball of threads in one’s hand for a long time,
delighting in one’s ability to tug here and there, and leaving everything even more
tangled. Fortunate is the hand that might enjoy unravelling the tangle by gently
and patiently pursuing a single thread — how widely and evenly the thread runs!
History of the world: it is towards this that kingdoms and bird nests small and
large are striving.51
Herder worried that Montesquieu had left “everything even more tangled,” but hoped that
the skeins of history might be more meticulously unravelled in the future, presumably by
philosophers like himself, or like Hegel.
Herder’s contribution is to have reconciled the particular with the whole by
portraying nations as centred on themselves while simultaneously seeing history as one
unified stream. Where other philosophers (such as Iselin) would uphold a dogmatic
notion of happiness, Herder promotes a relativist one.52 This relativist notion of
happiness enables Herder to argue simultaneously that Providence leads humans to
divinity through history and that peoples on Earth cannot be judged by a universal
standard. On the other hand, if Herder had argued from a merely relativist position, he
would have lost one of his crucial arguments against the thinkers of the Enlightenment,
namely that human rationality is impotent without the direction, or at least the impetus,
that comes from its Godly source. Herder found that the disdain of Enlightenment
thinkers for religion prevented them from being able to see that religion is the offspring
“not of fear, but of astonishment and admiration; it is a first attempt to explain the
world.”53
50
Rouché, 25.
Herder, AP, 80.
52
Rouché, 41.
53
Rouché, 43.*
51
23
Rather than suggest that the situation of humanity is improving all around the world,
as Enlightenment thinkers did, Herder saw that growth and decline is inevitable within
each nation, or within the lifespan of each people. Herder’s critique of the thinkers of the
Enlightenment includes derision over their belief that they can direct history through
books and ideas. Herder considers this confidence in humanity impious and counters the
Enlightenment thinkers with his belief that history is directed by Providence. Herder also
rehabilitates the past from its status as a period of unenlightened existence and redoubles
his attack on the Enlightenment with an argument that “enlightened” European
civilization is in fact in decline.54
Rouché emphasises that contrary to what Herder’s reputation would suggest, he is
less accepting of non-European peoples than other philosophers of his time (including his
French nemesis, Voltaire). Rouché suggests that the type of solidarity between human
beings used as a basis for the philosophy of history has shifted over time. While the
ancients considered political solidarity to be the pivotal factor, the historians of the
Middle Ages favoured religious solidarity; but in the 18th century new geographic
discoveries (facilitated by the use of the compass), paired with new methods of
communication (such as the printing press),55 and new levels of inter-cultural trade made
it necessary for serious philosophers to acknowledge the peoples that had been neglected
by traditional Occidental philosophies of history.
On his part, Herder later read Bartholome de Las Casas’ work on the ravages of the
Spaniards in Chiapas, along with other works written by various Europeans in the
colonies, and shows what Isaiah Berlin calls a “sympathetic imagination”56 towards
subjected peoples. He denounces slavery and sees the revealed Word of God in the
cultures of obscure peoples.57 On the other hand, Herder looks no further than the
54
Rouché, 39, 46.
Herder mentions the compass and the printing press, but connects them disparagingly to the “two or three
mechanical thoughts” on which the enlightened world hangs. (Herder, AP, 48)
56
Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment,” in The Proper Study of Mankind, 430.
57
Herder, “Letters for the Advancement of Humanity (1793-7),” tenth collection, in J.G. Herder,
Philosophical Writings, trans. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 394395. Henceforth cited as Herder, PW. Compare: “Wherever you may travel among so-called savages,
55
24
Mediterranean for his philosophy of history, commenting himself that his metaphorical
“chain” links only patriarchal Asia (Egypt) to Greece, Rome, and Europe, and leaves all
other nations “in the shadows.”58 (Hegel also stands accused of surveying other cultures
from the “standpoint of modern Western individualism.”)59
Furthermore, there are remarkable inconsistencies in Herder’s assessment of
European life, and specifically in his harsh judgment of Latinate cultures such as that of
France. Herder visited France and Italy without making any effort to engage the people
around him, for the most part writing while holed up in a room with his books, just as he
habitually wrote at home. Herder is at bottom an “enthusiast in a room, a seated
exultant.” He felt extraordinarily out of place within other cultures, partly because of a
lack of will to become familiar with them.60
As a rule Herder does not, however, succumb to the idea that the values of the
Enlightenment will cause a complete decline in humanity.61 He stresses the possibility
that a vague, but significant process of education is occurring on earth. That said, Herder
sees not the narrow kind of “Progress” heralded by the thinkers of the Enlightenment and
subject to the strictures of rationalist thought (progress he refers to as “perfection in the
narrow sense of the schoolhouse”62) but a more rambling development defined by
listen and you will hear the sound of scriptural explanations – living commentaries on revelation blowing
in the air.” (Herder, AP, 79)
58
Rouché, 102.* (Herder, Plan d’études pour le jeune Seschau 1772, in J.G. Herder, Herders sämmtliche
Werke, 33 vols., ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1877-1913) vol. XXXII,
398. Henceforth cited as Suphan.)
59
This accusation is levelled by Frederick C. Beiser, who adds: “When we consider factors like these it is
difficult not to say of Hegel’s historical method what Kierkegaard said of his philosophy as a whole:
‘Hegel is to be honoured for having willed something great and having failed to accomplish it.’” (Beiser,
“Hegel’s Historicism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, 287-288)
60
Rouché, 75, 558.*
61
Rouché, 79. Herder is also careful to praise the improvements in medical science, for which he is
grateful — in particular, for returning young European “gentlemen” to their parents after they had been
treated for venereal disease (whether the “girls” who “infected” them were also being treated was another
question, of course...). (Thus Herder: “Thus he might save a youth who, meaning to cut the first roses of
life, may have been surprised by a fire-snake – perhaps single-handedly returning [this youth] to himself,
to his parents, and to the future generations that live or die through us, to the world and virtue!” (Herder,
AP, 82)) Rouché hints that Herder may be referring to a “misadventure” experienced by Goethe on a trip
to Leipzig and expressed to Herder in confidence, although such rumours whispered through the mists of
time are hardly definitive.
62
Herder, AP, 68.
25
Rouché as a “progressive Education of humanity by God.”63 Herder suspects God’s
Education will favour some other culture after the decline of European civilization and
insists that other cultures will “triumph in the end.”64 If Herder is merely shaming
Europe in order to shame the early French Enlightenment, it is also true that he does not
take European dominance for granted. At the same time, he is limited by his belief that
no culture can be revived. Herder, despite acknowledging the way in which Christianity,
for instance, has always “been mixed up with the dough of peculiar [...] ways of
thinking,”65 sometimes interprets cultures as monolithic entities, failing to note how they
change slowly and shift into fluid hybrids in which something entirely new is created,
while defining features of the past are left behind or, alternately, retained. In short,
Herder would like to see cultures as monolithic and insular, even as he argues at another
level that history develops fluidly and that cultures are permeable.
Herder frequently measures the adult against the child, or the civilised man against
the primitive man, and prefers the advice of the Bible to “rational demonstrations.”66 For
instance, in reference to the Bible’s exhortation to childlike faith, Herder writes to
Enlightenment thinkers on the subject of earlier, simpler peoples: “How foolish [it would
63
Rouché, 79.* Rouché refers to this “Education dispensed by God” throughout his book, mentioning it on
many pages, including 95 and 104. Rouché attributes the expression “Education dispensed by God” to
Meinecke. (Rouché, 58) Compare Herder: “The so-called enlightenment and education of the world only
ever touched and kept its hold on a narrow strip of the globe. [...] We can also see why no nation
following upon another, even if it had all the same accessories, ever became what the other had been.
[...] Nor has this education ever retraced its steps into any country, so that it might, for a second time,
become what it had been earlier. [...] When God’s course among the nations is advancing with giant
strides, how would human powers be able to beat back a childish path? No Ptolemy could recreate
Egypt; no Hadrian, Greece; nor Julian, Jerusalem! Egypt, Greece, and Holy Land – how miserably you
lie there with your bare mountains, with no trace or voice of the genius who once walked upon you and
spoke to all the world. And why? [Because] he has finished speaking; [because] his imprint upon the
ages is complete; because the sword is worn out and the empty scabbard lies broken on the ground.”
(Herder, AP, 76-77) Compare also AP, 53: “If [this book] has not been written altogether in vain, we see
that the formation and progressing education of a nation is never anything other than a work of Fortune:
the result of a thousand coexisting causes, the product, as it were, of the entire element within which [a
nation] lives.”
64
Herder writes to this effect: “The more means and tools we Europeans invent to enslave, cheat, and
plunder you other continents, the more it may be left to you to triumph in the end. We forge the chains
by which you will pull us [one day], and the inverted pyramids of our constitutions will be righted on
your soil – you with us. But enough: it is evident how everything is moving towards greatness! We are
encompassing the globe by any means, and whatever shall follow will probably never be able to narrow
its base again. We are approaching something new, if only through decomposition.” (Herder, AP, 90-91)
65
Herder, AP, 37.
66
Rouché, 81.
26
be] for you to tarnish this ignorance and admiration, this imagination and reverence, this
enthusiasm and child-sense with the blackest devilry of your age, with fraud and
stupidity, superstition and slavery – to fabricate for yourself an army of priest-devils and
tyrant-ghosts that exist only in your soul!”67
For Herder, faith and poetry are linked, as are faith and culture. The same phases
determine the position of faith and poetry as men lose their sense of awe before the power
of nature: “[T]he divine inspiration degenerates into idolatry, then into art, then into
occupation, and finally, into pure formalism, represented in religious life by rituals.”68
This development hints at the one Hegel will outline in his Phenomenology of Spirit.
One of the contradictions Rouché discovers in Herder’s thought is that although he
believes (with Rousseau and Hamann) in the “superiority of the primitive nations” and
“reserves the future for these nations,” this future “consists precisely in losing this
primitiveness.”69 These nations are considered even by Herder to be demonstrating
potential, not to be fulfilling it.
Rouché disputes the notion that Herder introduced a “historical sense”70 that was
previously absent in Enlightenment thought. Rouché identifies those aspects of Herder’s
thought that have earned him the title of an especially historical thinker, and finds these
same ideas expressed variously in the works of others who preceded Herder (such as
Montesquieu, St. Evremond, Du Bos, Bossuet, Helvétius, Hume, Wegelin, Iselin,
Robertson, Adam Ferguson, Justus Möser, and even Voltaire). Herder’s originality in
67
Herder, AP, 11. Compare AP 10: “Have you ever taught a child a language by the philosopher’s
grammar or taught him to walk by some abstract theory of motion? Was it ever necessary to explain a
duty, whether the easiest or hardest, to him by a demonstration of moral philosophy?” And AP 86: “The
child is cruelly weaned of every last bit of sensuality. But behold the higher age that beckons!” And AP
14-15: “Of course the boy’s coat is too short for the giant, and the youth with his bride by his side finds
the school-prison distasteful! But look, your gown is, in turn, too long for the next person! Can you not
see, if you are at all familiar with the Egyptian spirit, how your bourgeois cleverness, philosophical
deism, easy frivolousness, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, pleasantries, law of peoples, and whatever other
names you give to this stuff, would, once again, have made a miserable old man of the boy?”
68
Rouché, 83.* Herder specifies that only Hebrew poetry retains its original piety.
69
Rouché, 85.*
70
Rouché, 135. Rouché defines such a “sense of history” as a sense of “continuity within diversity”
(Rouché, 141)*
27
this respect (despite his disdain for “system”) lies in the systematising of ideas he came
across elsewhere and found convincing.71
In Another Philosophy of History, Herder commits the crime he condemns in others:
he sums up whole eras and cultures by comparing them to the stages in the development
of a single human being. Herder had accused Montesquieu of “gauging every thing with
two or three words,” but arguably does so himself when he compares the Egyptian
patriarchs to childhood, the Greeks to youth, and the Romans to manhood.72 This feat is
a rational one and belies the reputation Herder has acquired of being primarily an
intuitive thinker. Regardless, Herder defines nations with more subtle words than the
aforementioned Montesquieu, for example, who equates a people to its form of
government, and reduces its form of government to a particular principle such as virtue or
honour.73
There are other general themes that contradict each other in Herder’s thought. Herder
is torn between the idea that nature is “always equally perfect” and the idea that nature’s
perfection continually increases. Herder also wavers between viewing humanity as “an
already given reality” and viewing it as an “ideal” that will eventually be realised, which
he conceives as the aforementioned “humanity,” or Humanität. The first view favours
relativism, while the second suggests a more dogmatic approach. For Herder, although
history is a movement towards Revelation, the development of history is also an end in
itself. Herder is not certain whether the last humans in history will benefit the most from
progressive Education by God, or whether national diversity will continue to hold sway
until the end of time and values will vary eternally around the world. He cannot decide
whether values can perhaps become universal in the last phases of history’s progression,
or whether they must remain in thrall to regional and cultural divisions.74
Furthermore, while Another Philosophy of History is written from an aesthetic,
literary perspective and represents cultures as “untranslatable authors that the historian
71
Rouché, 135, 136, 150.
Herder, AP, 12-23.
73
Rouché, 156, 157.
74
Rouché, 120, 234, 293, 335.
72
28
must taste ‘in the text’,”75 Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of History of Mankind judges
cultures as moral individuals from an ethical perspective. In the Ideas, Herder points out
the qualities and faults of nations, whereas in Another Philosophy of History, the flaws of
a nation are only implied through the description of the succeeding peoples.
Herder, despite his faith in the divine nature of reason, also acknowledges the
“terrestrial” quality of intelligence and how, along with our feelings and instincts,
intelligence seems to be “formed through contact with concrete things that surround us.”
Herder wonders what constitutes a soul “freed from material notions,” or “pure spiritual
perfection in a human soul.” To think on these terms makes little sense to Herder.
Herder holds the same disdain for “bookish and abstract erudition,” the same “avid
respect for the concrete,” as Faust.76 F. M. Barnard links Herder’s concept of Organism
to Leibniz’ substitution of the monad for the atom — a substitution that “gave birth to an
organic conception of the universe in which it is no longer regarded as the sum of its
parts but as a whole unfolding its multiple aspects, where the parts are not merely
constituent elements but individual entities existing in their own right.”77
Herder’s real originality consists in building a philosophy of history on the
foundations of the natural sciences, including astronomy, geophysics, biology,
anthropology, and ethnography. Herder comes close in some ways to suggesting the
theories of Darwin, albeit from the historical side of things. In the manner of scientists,
Herder does not think historians should be concerned about “final causes”; they should
rather look for the chain of “efficient causes.”78
The world is not merely linked by time and space for Herder, but also by “its own
essence, by the principle of its existence.” Herder discourages historians from seeking
final causes not because he has no faith in a progression of some kind, but because to try
to determine the intentions of Providence by projecting into the future is to seek those
75
Berlin observes as well that for Herder, “the critic must, so far as he is able, surrender to his author and
seek to see with the author’s eyes.” (Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment,” in The Proper Study of
Mankind, 406)
76
Rouché, 162, 186, 188.*
77
Barnard, 11.
78
Rouché, 368, 523, 524.*
29
intentions on the basis of the ethos that reigns in one’s own time (on the basis of “what
is”). What we can know in a limited sense is “what was” — but “what is to come”
cannot be deciphered. However, even when Herder renounces final causes, his
recognition of a rationally developing history “proceeds from a teleological finality.”79
Barnard explains Herder’s understanding of causation as recognition that “an event is
not an isolated occurrence in space or time.” Herder’s “principle of interaction bypasses,
if it does not supersede, the law of causation as it is ordinarily understood.” Since
everything is connected in time, the distinctions between “cause” and “effect” are
dissolved: they seem arbitrary in comparison to the flux of reality. 80
The way in which Herder interprets nations sometimes belies his intentions. In
Another Philosophy of History, Herder portrays a string of static nations that lack
porosity and that do not demonstrate the very quality he wishes to see represented in
history, namely that of fluidity. Herder’s nations can be summed up with the very
generalisations he accuses Enlightenment thinkers of making, and consequently lack the
gradual movement shown by real nations — a movement that may not leave room for
precise repetition, but one that is rife with unexpected revivals and cross-pollinations.
Herder writes satirically: “And then – state of bliss! – the golden age shall be upon us
again ‘when all the world will have one tongue and language and there shall be one flock
and one shepherd.’” He adds: “National characters, where have you gone?”81 It would
be difficult for Herder to fathom how in contemporary times several countries could
similarly count English or German, for instance, as their official language and yet have
entirely different national characters. Rouché suggests that Herder’s scheme of
monolithic nations is “creationist” since it characterises nations as “products of nature.”82
79
Rouché, 368, 379, 543.*
Barnard, 51.
81
Herder, AP, 65. Genesis 11:1-9; John 10:16.
82
Rouché, 88.* In parts, Herder comes close to interpreting history in a Darwinian light. “[The
philosopher who wishes to be like God] failed to consider that this concealed dual creature [Man –
hieroglyph of good and evil] could be, and given the structure of our world, almost had to be, modified a
thousand times over; that the climate and circumstances of an age will create national and worldly
virtues, flowers that grow and flourish almost without effort under one sky, but elsewhere die out or
languish miserably (thus the physics of history, science of the soul and politics about which our age has
80
30
The nation carries too much weight in Herder’s scheme since it defines every aspect
of a man’s existence. Herder equates the man with his language, his culture, and his
religion (which are all presumably tied to his nation) and with nothing else. The
“Oriental” can be nothing but an “Oriental,” while the Greek can be nothing but a Greek.
This leads him to the idea, according to Rouché and Berlin, that men can only be
genuinely creative authors if they write in their own mother tongue, or alternately, that
they can only be fully themselves in their country of origin83 — a questionable
conclusion at best.84 While it is true that language is both a substance in which man finds
himself living, and the primary outlet for man’s expression, it is unrealistic for Herder to
limit a man’s true expressiveness to his own original language. Herder’s obsession with
drawing national boundaries around all formative cultural factors is understandable
considering his dismay over the popularity of the French language, customs, and fashions
in Germany during the 18th century. However, this tendency obstructs Herder’s view
even as he perceives history with more nuance than other Enlightenment thinkers.
That the individual element is lacking in Herder’s philosophy of history means it
retains a mechanistic tone that hampers his attempt to be natural and spontaneous.
already fantasised so much and over which it has been brooding!); that all of this not only could, but had
to exist, but that on the inside, beneath the much-changed husk, the same kernel of being and capacity for
happiness could be stored and can indeed be expected, based on all human experience, to be [preserved
for the future].” (Herder, AP, 71)
83
Rouché, 89. This is an idea attributed to Herder that he himself (according to Rouché) later
acknowledged to be contestable. There is no source given for the idea in Rouché’s work. Berlin
develops this facet of Herder’s thought even further, arguing that “Germans can be truly creative only
among Germans; Jews only if they are restored to the ancient soil of Palestine. Those who are forcibly
pulled up by the roots wither in a foreign environment, when they survive at all: Europeans lose their
virtue in America, Icelanders decay in Denmark.” (Berlin, “The Counter-Enlightenment,” 255) Berlin’s
statement here, besides ending with what sounds like a William Carlos Williams phrase, is patently
ridiculous. Berlin and Rouché are extrapolating from the distinction Herder makes between the Ancient
periods when national cohesion was supposedly pervasive, and the period of the Enlightenment with its
universalistic values. Herder berates Voltaire on these terms: “You, Socrates of our time, can no longer
accomplish what Socrates did, for you lack the small, narrow, bustling, crowded stage, as well as the
simplicity, customs, and national character of [his] times – his fixed sphere! As a world citizen, and no
longer a citizen of Athens, you must naturally lack a view on what you ought to do in Athens, a secure
sense of what you are doing, and a feeling of joy about what you have accomplished – [you lack] your
daimon!” (Herder, AP, 80) In fact, Herder is merely pointing out the difference between the cohesive
state of the Athenians and the lofty cosmopolitan values of his own age– he is not claiming that modern
states must seek to recapture the “narrow stage” of the ancient Greek states.
84
Here, one need only think of authors like Joseph Conrad or Vladimir Nabokov to cast doubt on Herder’s
extrapolation.
31
Herder avoids mentioning individuals in his philosophy of history, while “[e]ach people
is defined less by its acts and institutions than by its [collective] psychology.” At the
same time, Herder’s notion of “national spirit” is less irrational, vitalistic, and optimistic
than it is “fatalistic and mechanical.” For Herder, the national spirit is predetermined
since history is preformed and merely unfolds itself, while the geographical situation and
climate in which a people thrives serve as a mould for its soul.85 In the meantime, Herder
is critical of “enlightened” thought precisely because it hangs on “[t]he needle’s point of
two or three mechanical thoughts.” Herder mocks the “mechanical” and specialised
systems of study:
Instead of hard-earned insights about the needs and genuine characteristics of the
land, what an eagle’s view, what a view of the whole, laid out as if on a map or a
philosophical diagram, has been brought to our political economy and political
science! Principles have been taken from Montesquieu’s mouth by and with which a
hundred different peoples and corners of the earth can be spontaneously tallied in
two moments according to the basic arithmetic of politics. Likewise with all fine
arts and crafts, almost down to the last day labour. Who needs to climb around, to
toil strenuously in the depths, as in a vaulted cellar? One can reason! With
dictionaries and philosophies that cover them all, without the need to understand a
single one, tool in hand, they have all become mere abridgements of their prior
pedantry – abstracted spirit! Philosophy out of two thoughts, the most mechanical
thing in the world.86
But Herder’s criticism of things mechanical could be levelled at his own depiction of
history to the degree that it remains stuck in the ruts of geographical influence and
cultural isolationism.
Although Herder underlines the vitality and cohesion of earlier cultures (which were
almost certainly less cohesive than he imagines), he also admits that his own
Enlightenment period is like the “tree’s highest branches,” from which the most can be
seen of “God’s greatest works.”87 Herder does acknowledge: “If enlightenment does not
always seem to benefit us, if we are losing the depth and embeddedness of a river as we
are expanding our surface and breadth, then this is surely because we, already a small sea,
85
Rouché, 94, 109, 118.*
Herder, AP, 51.
87
Herder, AP, 85.
86
32
are on our way [to becoming] a great ocean.”88 While the Enlightenment is embodied by
the “thin, airy twigs” of Herder’s tree, through which the “rays of the sun” play and
which tremble and whisper “with every gust of wind,” and while it may represent
excessive and “[r]elentless sweetening;” it is also the highest-reaching epoch, the most
exalted point in the tree’s development thus far. Herder’s distaste arises from the
triumphal tone of the Enlightenment and its attendant disregard for historical
understanding rather than from its actual attainments.
In the spirit of irony, Rouché accuses Herder himself of prompting a de-vitalisation of
European culture through his scheme of relativity: Herder failed to understand that by
deflating the hopes of the Enlightenment thinkers, he was draining the vital fluid of
confidence; he did not see that all great creative periods in history are bereft of “historical
sense.”89 (This last is perhaps also true of the particularly destructive periods in history).
The importance of the Germanic race for Herder draws predictable concern from
Rouché, who wrote his book on Herder’s philosophy of history throughout the years
leading up to World War II. The particular constellation of arguments that Herder uses as
a basis for his philosophy of history strikes Rouché as dangerous in that it promotes racederived views and reduces the ecumenical ideals of Christianity (as underlined in the
parable of the Good Samaritan [Luke, 10:29-37]) to more malleable notions of gradual
Revelation. For instance, the concept of Revelation might more easily be used to justify
acts of national aggression if Herder’s arguments were interpreted merely as a
glorification of the ancient nation-states and a call for the revival of the tribal mentality.
But if Herder’s philosophy contributed to the political pressure that was growing in
Germany at the time of the publication of Rouché’s book, Herder himself can hardly be
held accountable for it. However, it is true that the implicit strains of support for
Germanic fervour in Herder’s philosophy were later made explicit through the Sturm und
Drang movement, from which they, even later, were shrewdly enlisted to the cause of the
National Socialists.
88
89
Herder, AP, 85.
Rouché, 574.*
33
Furthermore, Herder’s unorthodoxy stands alongside his conservatism: where he is
destructive in politics and religion, he affirms an “imperialism of class, race, and nation”
in his philosophy of history. Herder elevates “the people to the detriment of the learned
and the governors” — an unsettling observation when contemplating the demise of the
Weimar Republic during Germany’s short-lived hiatus from war. Herder’s arguments
about racial superiority are mostly presented in the Ideas, while in Another Philosophy of
History, although Herder sympathises in theory with other peoples, he limits his
description of history to the traditionally accepted Egyptian, Mediterranean, and
European nations.
In his defence, Herder asks of nationalism: “Who would go adopt without distinction
this collection of stupidities and errors as well as excellent qualities and virtues, and ...
break spears on other nations in the name of this Dulcinea?”90 Ioannis Evrigenis
cautions: “[A]daptable though they may be to a Christian humanist point of view,
Herder’s observations regarding nations and peoples might also open the door to a more
aggressively nationalist outlook.” Evrigenis rightly acknowledges, however, that
Herder’s nationalism “was never political, and his personal politics simply had no room
for aggression, violence, and disrespect.”91
At another level, Herder’s Rousseauian sympathies translate into an observation of
the loss of Germanic vigour that anticipates Nietzsche’s Will to Power and connects
Herder to what Rouché calls the “Titanism” of the Sturm und Drang movement. Herder
distinguished himself from the Sturm und Drang thinkers by implicitly recognising the
opposition between Titan vitality and Christian morality, and also by exploiting the
unwitting boost Enlightenment thinkers gave to the more fundamental, charitable ideals
of Christian morality. On the other hand, Herder underlines the revealed, scriptural, and
90
91
Rouché, 68, 246, 277.* Rouché cites from Herder’s “42nd Letter.” (Suphan, vol. XVII, 211)
Ioannis Evrigenis, Introduction to Herder, AP, xxxvi.
34
historical qualities of Christianity, and shows indignation that during the Enlightenment
priests should have been made into “servants in livery.”92
Herder’s religious views and his belief in Providence form the backbone of his
philosophy of history. Herder’s metaphor comparing people within history to links on a
chain is inspired by Schlözer’s description of invisible Providence holding the destinies
of humanity at the end of long chains. Rouché disagrees with claims that Herder was
supportive of a kind of “pantheism in history.” In Another Philosophy of History, Herder
gives an orthodox interpretation of a personal God. It is also true that for Herder, God
does not “gain consciousness of Himself” through humanity as He does for Hegel,
although humanity may very well “gain consciousness of God” through history.93
Herder cautions that the final goal of history, reason, cannot be used as a weapon
against Revelation itself. Herder does not mean to refer to the attainment of reason as an
end-point after which the curve of history dives into oblivion, but explains that “history is
simply a meandering progression of reason,” a reason that must eventually come to know
itself and to know reality. Until Revelation has been attained, reason is incomplete and
therefore not competent to judge Revelation. As soon as reason (without its counterpart
of a completed Revelation) claims to recognise the end-result, it has overstepped its
bounds. Reason and Revelation are “identical; all conflict between them arises from
where reason thinks it is completed.” Herder follows in the direction of Lessing, who
argued that although religious truths were not made rational upon being revealed, they
were revealed so that they might in time become rational.94 Herder also seems to echo
Gottsched, “who gave the German Enlightenment its eudaemonist character and its
optimistic faith in human perfectibility.”95
92
Rouché, 63, 68.* Compare Herder: “What little wreckage [of the Gothic edifice] remains is confined so
strictly that land, inhabitant, citizen, fatherland may still mean something occasionally; but master and
slave, despot and liveried servants of all offices, vocations, and estates, from the peasant up to the cabinet
minister, and from the minister to the priest – that is now everything.” (Herder, AP, 49)
93
Rouché, 99.*
94
Rouché, 99-100.
95
Barnard, 12-13.
35
Herder eventually conceives of an opposition between the Christian religion and the
“cult of Christ,” and rejects the notions of Incarnation and Redemption; changes leading
Rouché to propose that Herder’s religious orthodoxy is in fact eroded by his belief in a
progressive Revelation (as far from Herder’s intention as that may have been).96
Although Herder’s philosophy of history shares elements of Lessing’s philosophy of
history, including the progression overseen by Providence, Herder is more interested in
the richness of the details within that progression than Lessing, whose style is more
pedagogical and who delights more in the wisdom and order of the progression as a
system.97 The Humanität of Herder’s Ideas can also be related to Lessing’s notion of the
divine Education of man, through which he fulfils the task of becoming human “by the
conscious development of his potentialities.”98
Herder resembles Hamann in his belief that history unfolds as directed by God. The
facet of Herder’s thought that reflects his belief in Revelation points to the historian as “a
prophet turned towards the past, who decodes after the fact the intentions of God.”
Herder sees no contradiction between his sympathy for human liberty, his belief in the
potential of human reason, and his conviction that God is responsible for the progression
of history. In the meantime, Herder states plainly that man is incapable of producing by
himself such a work as his own history. In Another Philosophy of History, Providence
intervenes directly in the development of humanity,99 while in the fifteenth book of
Herder’s Ideas, the laws of the universe unfold themselves as pre-planned. Each nation
96
Rouché, 100-101. Rouché notes the effect of the Revelation-based theology of Mirza Mohamed in 19th
century Shiite Persia, a theology that was similar in nature to the theories of Lessing and Herder. Rouché
suspects that the introduction of a scheme in which Revelation holds precedence, and in which no prophet
or people holds the definitive religious position, leads in all faiths to a questioning of the orthodox views
— whether intentionally or not. Rouché also adds that with Herder, “as with Lessing, the influence of
Leibniz ends up harming the Christian philosophy of history it supposedly supports.” (Rouché, 112)
97
Rouché, 107.
98
Barnard, 16.
99
Herder argues in this vein that “[i]t is only for God, or for the fools among men, to enter every moral or
immoral effect of an action, be it ever so distant and contingent, into a calculation of the merits and the
primary intentions of the actor! Otherwise, who would face more accusers throughout the world than the
first and only actor, the Creator himself?” (Herder, AP, 95) Compare: “Everything is grand destiny, not
reflected over, not hoped for, not caused by human beings. Can you not see, you ant, that you are merely
crawling on the great wheel of doom? [...] Human being, you have always been just a small, blind
instrument, [used] almost against your will.” (Herder, AP, 47)
36
lives and dies out according to the natural cycle that consists in flowering followed by
decline.100
It must be understood that for Herder, religion was national, as nationalism was
religious. What Luther had accomplished in faith, Herder wished to accomplish for
German literature: to free it from external influences and revitalise it. In this light, it is
easy to see why Herder’s confusion over the tensions between faith (with all its attendant
ambiguities including its occasional compatibility with the ecumenical Humanität, or
“brotherhood” of the Enlightenment)101 and nationalism (with its inherent connections
both to the outrage of exploited peoples as well as to the imperialist aspirations of
peoples like the Romans) persisted.102
Herder’s belief that the lack of a past makes a nation more likely to have a future
points to his faith in Providence: without the consideration of a divine plan, Herder could
hardly be so convinced that an insignificant past bodes well for a nation’s future. For his
support of a progressive Revelation in history that encompasses a wealth of peoples,
Herder enlists the words of the Christ: “In my Father’s house are many mansions...”
(John 14:2)103 As Frederick M. Barnard explains, for Herder, “[d]iversity, not
uniformity, is the design of the Almighty.”104
Herder’s God is both immanent and transcendent: He is a double-God. Herder’s God
is science as well, since what are the laws of the universe but those that apply to the
creation and subsequent development and evolution of the universe? For Herder,
“natural and historical laws are a Revelation; moral laws are that same Revelation
perceived by human conscience; they are a Revelation of God to man by man and as such
represent a Revelation squared.” Herder also subscribes to the theological commonplace
that God adapts the level of His language to the capacity for understanding of His
100
Rouché, 96, 98, 117.*
It is evident that the Humanität of which Herder speaks in his Letters towards the Advancement of
Humanity conforms to the ideals of the Enlightenment insofar as it advocates “brotherhood” (a vague,
pseudo-political term used to denote a feeling similar to the “agape” that is encouraged among
Christians).
102
Rouché, 133.
103
Rouché, 108, 337.
104
Barnard, 58.
101
37
audience, and that the uncovering of scientific truths occurs in tandem with man’s
capacity to understand them.105 Hegel would take this a step further and say that the onus
is on man to discover what he may: the truths of the universe are there to be uncovered,
and man fulfils the destiny of Spirit in the world by uncovering them.
Of course, while Herder “affirms the absolute, ecumenical values of Christianity”
through his vision of a gradual Education of humanity by God, he simultaneously
proclaims “the absolute, but local” values of Germanism, as well as the “historical and
ethnic relativity of all cultural values, sometimes up to and including Christianity itself.”
The juxtaposition of national relativism with morality hampers Herder’s logic in an
obvious way: to urge nations “jealously to guard their particular traditions and to close
themselves to outside influences is to approve the right to deforming specialisation that
the humanist admirers of the ‘Greek totality,’ and Herder first of all, condemn for
individuals.”106
Accordingly, the principal clashes within Herder’s thought haunt his religious
argument: his literary, or nationalist strain, through which he seeks to liberate Germany
from French influence, is fundamentally pluralist and relativist, but his faith in
Christianity leads him to expect a divine plan. Herder equivocates between these two
commitments, denying “in literature the existence of eternal and international values in
which he believes in religion.” Insofar as Herder’s nations relate to God’s gradual
Revelation, they are a means to an end; insofar as they relate to Herder’s Fortgang and
his relativist view of the happiness of nations, they “possess intrinsic value.” Herder
contradicts himself further by claiming that Christianity is the religion for all humanity
while contending that it has no right to spread beyond Europe.107 It is also unclear
whether Herder at bottom rejoices over the Christianising of the Germanic peoples, or
despairs of it.
105
Rouché, 323, 381, 382.* Rouché recalls this argument Herder makes in his Letters Regarding the Study
of Theology. (Suphan X., 147-148)
106
Rouché, 114, 121.*
107
Rouché, 116, 117, 126.*
38
In short, Herder does not arrive at a point where he can distinguish between “the two
sources of morality and religion,” namely strictly ethnic values and universal values, the
“closed morality” of the nation (or “civic devotion to a closed group”) and the “open
morality” (Bergson) of humanity (or “love of the whole human species”).108
Furthermore, in Herder’s relativist scheme, nations are encouraged to develop different
religions, which would sooner deepen than help to overcome inter-national tensions.
Rousseau’s influence contributes to the wavering in Herder’s thought, including the
fact that although Herder’s respect for the religious Patriarchs coincides with Rousseau’s
admiration for primitive man, Rousseau’s pessimistic view of the present (although it
matches Herder’s distaste for the Enlightenment) clashes with Herder’s belief in a
progressive Revelation. The pessimism Rousseau spares nature but foists on history does
not sit well with Herder: in the end, Herder’s optimism overcomes his attachment to
Rousseau’s views.109
Unlike Rousseau, Herder thinks of human art and of the artificial in general as
expressly given by God: He has given his creatures the right to modify His own
Creation. Artifice (that is to say what has been contrived by man through reflection and
activity) does not carry for Herder the same negative connotations it carries for Rousseau.
When faced with the choice between “creating” and “understanding,” Herder
equivocated. To describe history in a relativist manner was to understand best the reality
of the past, but to frame history in Revelation, or in the cosmopolitan value of Humanität
(which he had previously scorned), was to distil meaning from history and avoid the
charge of empty relativism.110
Herder envisions two kinds of freedom: the true freedom of “acting according to
reason and equity,” and the freedom of error; the latter, alas, is really “the faculty of not
obeying our profound destination.”111 Herder makes clear his belief that man lost his real
108
Rouché, 124.*
Rouché, 134.
110
Rouché, 526, 590.*
111
Rouché, 397.* Barnard provides a better understanding of Herder’s scheme in this respect. Barnard
argues that Herder “carefully distinguishes [...] human and social development from other forms of
109
39
liberty when he first disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden.112 Overall, it can be said that
Herder has a “profound tendency” to “neglect the initiative of men in human history to
the benefit of nature, the secret agent of God.” Rouché places Herder at the end of the
tradition of Christian philosophers of history who over-identify history with the “will of
God, at the expense of human liberty.” Herder is torn in this regard, writing on the same
page that the seeds of the Reformation had been planted long before Luther came along,
but required his personal intervention in order to flourish; and that man has always been,
“despite [his] will, nothing but a small, blind instrument.”113
It can also be argued that Herder perceives consciousness as a way in which man can
be aware “of an area of movement in which he can exercise the power of choice.” Herder
recognises that “human freedom does not consist in the realisation of the existence of an
area of choice as such, but rather in man’s awareness of its limits,” as will Hegel after
him. Herder writes: “[I]t is the first germ of freedom to feel that one is not free, to
recognise the fetters that restrain one. The strongest and the most free among men feel
this most deeply and they strive on.” Here, Herder parts company with Rousseau, who
argues that man begins free but civilises himself into captivity.114 At the same time, for
Herder as for Kant, man is obliged to do what is good115 — a position that Hegel will
question in the Phenomenology of Spirit.
In fact, Herder’s conception of Good and Evil shifts throughout Another Philosophy
of History according to what strain of his thought is being emphasised. From the
standpoint of Herder’s belief in gradual Revelation, Evil consists in the egocentrism of
growth. Whereas the latter develop in an unconscious or instinctive manner, human beings, as creatures
of Besonnenheit, [awareness] are capable of realising consciously the nature and direction of their
development. The extent to which they do will differ, however, from individual to individual according
to the degree to which Besonnenheit results in Besinnung or actual consciousness. The process of human
development is envisaged, therefore, as the unfolding of Besonnenheit into Besinnung, by virtue of which
it ceases to be a ‘blind force’ and becomes instead the expression of a conscious self-determining mind.”
(Barnard, 47-48)
112
Rouché reports that Herder writes in Suphan, VII, 126-127: “Freedom existed in God’s commandment;
all the rest is the freedom of the serpent, the bestial servitude to the senses.” Compare Suphan VIII, 202:
“Where there is the spirit of God, is also found freedom.”
113
Rouché, 93, 103, 118.*
114
Barnard, 95.
115
Barnard, 95.
40
“free thinkers” such as those of the Enlightenment, who assume they have discovered the
ideals for all of humanity. From the standpoint of Herder’s theory of the relativity of the
happiness of nations, Evil consists in the partiality of the historian, and in the delusion of
Enlightenment thinkers that there is progress in history that can be objectively identified.
From the literary and religious standpoint of Herder’s belief that nations flourish only
once and subsequently face decline, Evil is the (irreversible) “loss of vitality.”116
But Herder’s optimism ultimately holds sway, since for Herder antagonism and
conflict perform a “beneficial function in human and social development in that [they]
help towards the release of constructive energies.”117 Hegel arrives at the same
conclusion as Herder where the “negative” is concerned. In Charles Taylor’s words, man
for Hegel is “inescapably at odds with himself.” Man has been led, through reason, to
experience constant tension: the “exigencies of thinking carry him into opposition to life,
to the spontaneous and natural in him; so that he is led to divide himself, to create a
distinction and a discord within himself where originally there was a unity.” Because of
this, for Hegel, there is “a hierarchy of modes of thought” that expresses itself in the
difference between art and religion, which involve “picture thinking,” and philosophy,
which does not. 118
If there are those who are primarily defenders of the collective and those who defend
the individual from the collective, Herder was the former. Herder’s instinct suited the
English meaning of his name, since he wrote to gather men in “morality, philosophy of
history, [and] literary criticism,” but ultimately could not decide whether to shepherd the
German flock or the Christian flock.119
Herder’s political peculiarity is that he can be counted a precursor both to the French
Revolution and to the Counter-Revolution. While the revolutionary aspects of his
thought are mostly typical for his period, it is remarkable that Herder — like Hamann —
was attacking the Revolution before it occurred. His defence of tradition made Herder a
116
Rouché, 115.
Barnard, 136.
118
Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 20.
119
Rouché, 540.*
117
41
precursor to Burke, to Savigny, and partly also to Hegel. Herder is at once the last
representative of the “great Christian humanists,” and the “spiritual father of a younger
generation,” including, of course, the young Hegel.120
The “rhythm” of Herder’s thought is peculiar to him: a slowly progressing
Revelation, in which nations flower one by one and show their own characteristics, and in
which the German culture, in particular, must defend itself from un-Germanic cultural
infiltration and resulting debasement. On the other hand, because of his particular
interpretation of history’s movements, “Herder possesses the originality of having, at the
height of the 18th century, prophesied the decline of the Occident; and, full of humility,
refused to consider this decline of the Occident to be the decline of humanity.”121
Herder’s philosophy challenges both the universal values of classicism and the
dogmas of the Reformation. It has a touch of the struggle of the gentes against the
imperium and the ecclesia. Rouché proposes that Herder’s work belonged to the “quest
for frontiers” that characterises German literary, religious, and political history;122 but
this quest can be said to define the modern age itself in many respects.
Fundamentally, Rouché would say that despite his self-contradictions and through his
scheme of nations developing according to “the principle of sufficient reason and of the
realisation of all possibilities,” Herder writes both a synthetic and an analytical
philosophy of history, never subjugating the historical element to the philosophical one.
Herder’s philosophy of history offers as much consonance as it does dissonance; he
resolves the tensions between Enlightenment theories such as that of Voltaire, who
doubted the existence of Providence in the face of past historical declines, and that of
Iselin, who touted the “progress” of European civilisation that would make future decline
impossible. Herder manages to recognise the particular and the varied within history,
frame the whole picture, and give meaning to the historical process, all the while refusing
to suggest that his own era represents the grand finale of human development.
120
Rouché, 538, 541, 545.
Rouché, 546, 573.* Herder’s relativist theory of nationalities heralds the decline of the Christian
Occident a whole century before Spengler. (Rouché, 560)
122
Rouché, 556, 561.*
121
42
For Herder, “The whole that appears as a whole in each of its particulars must be a
great one!” But “in every particular, there is always an indistinct oneness that alone
reveals itself and points towards the whole.”123 That the Enlightenment could represent
the end of history and the beginning of universal harmony seems as likely to Herder as
though in humanity, perfection could “have exhausted all its aspects.”124 But Herder, like
Hegel after him, sees a purpose underlying history and simultaneously recognises the
relativity of cultures as it was emphasised by Du Bos, Montesquieu, and Wegelin.125 It is
also true that Herder himself considered the nationalist and cosmopolitan aspects of his
philosophy to be complementary rather than contradictory forces. After all, he insisted
on “the natural harmony between the particular and the universal.” Likewise, Herder’s
vision of Humanität, expounded in his Letters and in his Ideas, comes across as “an act of
faith, a moral and religious conviction about man’s social destiny.”126
123
Herder, AP, 96.
Herder, AP, 96.
125
Rouché, 115, 548, 671.*
126
Barnard, 86-87. Barnard refers to Humanität as the “doctrinal and emotional source” of Herder’s
“secular faith.”
124
43
CHAPTER II
HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: REVELATION OF ABSOLUTE
KNOWING, OR “COMPREHENDED HISTORY”
All civilisations are in theory essential for the progress of the whole according to
Herder and Hegel, which is just what sets them apart from many other philosophers.
Herder is known to have disliked systems since they impose universal values that he
found empty. 1 While Hegel is often branded as an idealist who subjects reality to an
overarching system, he in fact agrees with Herder that universal values are only imposed
on the world arbitrarily. Hegel has been deemed a conservative because of his
impression that “what is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational,”2 but he knew
that “what is actual” changes, evolves. He does not argue for acceptance of events
without criticism, but rather for proper and careful understanding of what could be called
the psychological undercurrents of human history. Nor is Hegel really an idealist, except
insofar as the Phenomenology of Spirit is an allegory for the intellectual blossoming of
the philosopher. He is certainly not the proto-Communist some commentators make him
out to be: he refuses to look seriously beyond his own era into the future, an exercise he
1
That said, Herder also mocks the new “manner” of philosophy, practised “without system or principles, so
that one might always remain free, at another time, to believe the opposite as well; without
demonstrations; clothed in humour since ‘dour philosophy has never improved the world.’” (Herder, AP,
67) Incidentally, Hegel, who was called “the old man” among friends when he was still a youth, might be
considered the quintessential “dour philosopher.”
2
Hegel, Preface to the Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967),10.
44
understands to be useless. It seems as though Hegel ends history with a kind of utopian
state of “Absolute knowing,” but in fact, he demonstrates what “Comprehended History”
looks like from the perspective of the “science” of philosophy.
In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel takes Herder’s survey of human history into
another, more complex dimension. Hegel does not proceed by assessing history
chronologically, but rather by performing what could almost be called “psychoanalysis”
of the human consciousness of history. Where history follows what is a conscious
trajectory for human beings, it cannot be traced back to its beginnings. At what point
exactly man became civilised, or when human groups began to interact in a way that
contemporary man would say carried “historical” significance, it will perhaps never be
possible to say. Perhaps there will never be a clear dividing line between anthropology
and history. Hegel’s intention is to determine at a more philosophical, and
simultaneously primal level how the beginnings of human consciousness lead into the
conscious history of human beings, and how the development of that consciousness has
always affected and continues to affect the direction of that history. He examines what
could loosely be called the subconscious of the history of man. This endeavour he
equates to a “Bacchanalian revel,” in which the student of philosophy will “taste” in
every stage and cultural ethos as she would a wine: she will let it influence her mind. At
the same time, she will retain her special view as a student of philosophy: she will
observe from “behind the back” of consciousness, “recollecting” that consciousness
itself.3 Hegel leads the somewhat exacting “revel” as an uncharacteristically pedagogical
Bacchus.
Max Rouché connects Herder and Hegel through their “Judeo-Christian optimism” —
a characteristic that leads them to share an interpretation of history as a succession of
progressive stages that gradually build the foundation for a kind of Revelation. Rouché
simplifies Hegel’s scheme, calling it a “Hegelian succession of opposites,”4 but
3
4
Hegel, Preface to PhG, §47. Compare Plato’s “Bacchic frenzy of philosophy.” (Symposium 218b)
Barnard proposes something very similar: that Herder “significantly foreshadowed in his theory of
opposites Hegel’s dialectic.” (Barnard, 161)
45
recognises how Herder’s and Hegel’s overall schemes reflect each other. Both Herder
and Hegel manage to “reconcile the heterogeneity of civilisations to the unity of
becoming.” These thinkers see a process in which human beings continuously learn to
respond to the excesses of the past; at the same time, the notion of “opposites” is not
adequate to explaining the way in which cultural stages evolve for Herder, or for Hegel.
Hegel will posit what is widely referred to as a “synthesis of opposites,”5 but Hegel’s
dialectic in fact involves a “sublation”6 from one stage to another in such a way that the
first stage falls away and is lost, but its most truthful feature is carried over into the next
stage and becomes the ground for the next debate. This can only be superficially called a
“synthesis of opposites.” It is more like a play in which each scene’s tensions lead to the
revelation of a new truth that will form the basis for the next scene’s dilemma.
Herder’s philosophy already contains many of the notions Hegel will eventually
expound. Ioannis D. Evrigenis writes in his introduction to Herder’s Another Philosophy
of History that Herder urges us to “strike a balance between the particular, which in itself
is a whole world, and the universal, in the context of which our overwhelming worlds are
but fleeting moments. Only thus can we appreciate our significance, as well as that of
others, in Providence’s grand design.”7 The relationship of the particular to the universal
is of course one of the driving elements behind Hegel’s philosophy, and he seeks to
reconcile these two elements in a way that preserves them both.
Herder cannot abide the kind of history that “calculates everything in the case of
every land with a view to a utopian plan in accordance with unproved first principles.”
He calls this a “foreign varnish that robs the forms of our world and the preceding world
of their true stance, even of their outlines.”8 While Hegel will develop a philosophy that
some might call a “utopian plan,” he is really trying to take into account everything as a
5
Rouché, 102.*
A word used by some commentators to denote Hegel’s expression “Aufhebung.” Taylor specifies as well
that in the Hegelian solution, “the unity of man and world, of finite and infinite subject, does not abolish
the difference. Not only is the unity hard-won out of difference, as man struggles to rise to the level
where the unity can be grasped; but the ultimate unity retains the difference within it.” (Taylor, Hegel and
Modern Society, 48)
7
Ioannis Evrigenis, Introduction to Herder, AP, xxxv.
8
Herder, PW, 413.
6
46
whole while retaining the specific parts in their “true stance.” Hegel cannot be used in
the defence of orthodoxy any more than he can be used as a prototype for Communism.
Fundamentally, Hegel heeds Herder’s warning not to impose the universal on the various
“forms of the world.” What has occurred was necessary to bring the world where it is
now, but that does not mean that everything was pre-planned, only that the development
of human consciousness brought them about necessarily. As Hegel writes:
As regards historical truths — to mention these briefly — it will be readily granted
that so far as their purely historical aspect is considered, they are concerned with a
particular existence, with the contingent and arbitrary aspects of a given content,
which have no necessity. But even such plain truths [...] are not without the
movement of self-consciousness.9
Hegel followed Herder’s lead in perceiving each cultural group within history as
distinct and inimitable, exposing what he thought were defining phases in the unfolding
of human consciousness and judging every standpoint of this kind according to its own
standard.10 This is the most obvious way in which Hegel has learned directly from
Herder in the Phenomenology of Spirit.11 Herder’s notion that civilisations follow each
other successively, each “developing only certain aspects of humanity,” is taken up in a
more refined way by Hegel when he drops the chronological succession and looks for the
undercurrents of consciousness. 12 The standpoints, for Hegel, are not limited to cultural
standpoints, nor are the phases of consciousness related to a specific culture in every
case. Furthermore, Hegel is not interested in judging epochs and cultural values
according to a contrived universal standard.
For Hegel, there is no sense in which these
ways of thinking are “good” or “bad”: they merely are, and they each have a role to play
in the development of consciousness.
It is also clear that Herder’s description of nations as cohesive entities with peculiar
psychological configurations is also carried over into Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
9
Hegel, Preface to PhG, §41.
Taylor refers to this process in Hegel as a “dialectical movement as generated by a clash between a
purpose or standard and its attempted fulfilment.” (Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 59)
11
Beiser, 281-282.
12
Rouché, 548.*
10
47
Some other similarities include generous use of the concept of “Geist,” or Spirit, which
for Herder surfaces primarily in his idea of “national spirit,” but for Hegel extends from
Herder’s more profound idea that it is reason that connects us, through language, to the
creative Being, and that our consciousness, as it develops, becomes Spirit itself.
Furthermore, Hegel makes constant use of the distinction Herder drew between keeping
one’s “face close to the picture, fumbling with this splinter or groping at that speck of
colour” without “seeing the entire image;” and, alternately, grasping “the whole of such
alternating ages,” imposing “order on them, pursuing them gently.” Herder defines the
ideal study of history: “To isolate only the main causes underlying each scene, to follow
the currents quietly, and then – to name them [...].”13 Here is Hegel’s distinction between
“picture thinking,” which characterises every stage up until “Absolute knowing,” and that
Absolute knowing itself.
Herder and Hegel think of cognition similarly. For Herder, reason cannot be
distinguished from language, and both have a human, natural origin. Herder envisions
that “[t]he human soul builds for itself this sense of reason as a creator, as an image of
His nature. The origin of language hence only becomes divine in a worthy manner
insofar as it is human.”14 Like Herder, Hegel is dissatisfied with the notion of cognition
as an instrument, which presupposes that “there is a difference between ourselves and this
cognition.”15 What distinguishes humans from other animals is reason, cognition,
capacity to know, language: all factors in the human conception of the divine, and all of
one piece in the puzzle of Revelation.
Herder’s insistence on the organic nature of reality also leaves a strong impression on
Hegel’s philosophy. Herder writes that the Spirit of history
knows that in human nature the principles of sensuality, of imagination, of
selfishness, of honour, of sympathy with others, of godliness, of the moral sense,
of faith, etc., do not dwell in separated compartments, but that in a living
13
Herder, AP, 25-26.
Herder, “Treatise on the Origin of Language,” in PW, 163.
15
Hegel, Introduction to PhG, §74.
14
48
organization that gets stimulated from several sides, many of them, often all,
cooperate in a living manner.16
These principles are all, according to the later works of Herder, “operating towards a
single purpose,” namely that of “the great principle of Humaneness [Menschlichkeit],”17
which has also previously been mentioned as “Humanität.”
For Hegel, the organic format will be much more comprehensive, since it will survey
the interior development of human consciousness in its full relation to the world, a
development that does not necessarily run in tandem with, but that is organically
connected to, history. Taylor dismisses Hegel’s emphasis on a “self-authenticating, selfjustifying” form of knowledge that can provide a total understanding of the world as an
unrealistic aspect of his philosophy. Taylor proposes that what is meaningful in Hegel’s
thought is the approach he took to his dismissal of the epistemological tradition that had
culminated in Kant and that relied so much on a panoply of assumptions that could never
be proven to be true. Hegel, while incorporating the criticisms of the Enlightenment
made by Hamann and Herder into his philosophy, refuses to resort to a nihilist viewpoint
in his assessment of human endeavour.18
Like Herder, Hegel refuses to see human beings as animals “with rationality added.”
Man is “a different kind of totality,” one “in which the fact of reflective consciousness
leaves nothing else unaltered; the feelings, desires, even the instinct for self-preservation
of a reflective being must be different from those of other animals.”19
Hegel’s philosophy is not an “enclosed monument,” but neither does it involve an
“endless chain” of history that continues forever, with a perpetually fleeing horizon
ahead. A landmark is passed when man attains Absolute Knowing: the philosopher has
peered through the penumbra of time and discerned the undercurrents of human history,
and has come to the realisation that the truth dwells not in a specific place, but rather in
16
PW, 415.
PW, 415.
18
Taylor, in Hegel: l’esprit absolu/Hegel: The Absolute Spirit, ed. Theodore F. Geraets (Ottawa: Editions
de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1984), 169.
19
Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society, 19.
17
49
the process that never ends. The philosopher must realise that truth lies in the “pure act
of putting in relation everything that proposes itself in the coming about of
contingency.”20
While nature exhibits recurring cycles, there is, in nature, really “nothing new under
the sun.”21 Thus Hegel: “Only in those changes which take place in the spiritual sphere
does anything new emerge.”22 Hegel resolves the tension between nature and human
knowledge “not in a narrow way that simply reduces nature to pure intelligibility
(Descartes), but in a comprehensive way that allows nature to preserve its otherness, and
freedom its necessity.”23
That said, there is loss in history for Hegel, since what is understood a certain way in
a specific age cannot be understood that way again. Hegel uses the image of the owl
(philosophy), which sees and does not act; to which could be added that of the mole
(history), which burrows ahead but sees nothing.24 When a “shape of life” has “grown
old,” philosophy paints only “grey in grey”; it never rejuvenates, but merely
understands.25
Hegel begins his Phenomenology of Spirit with a lot of philosophical baggage from
thinkers like Kant, Fichte, and Schelling on his mind. He addresses innumerable
disagreements with other philosophers without officially divulging the philosophers’
identities. Hegel objects to the idea that there has to be an objective “beginning” to
philosophical endeavour: in fact, there really only needs to be a subject and an attendant
object. Hegel will attempt to reconcile Parmenides’ “the being,” or “the one,” with
Heraclitus’ “the flux.” He seeks to reconcile Plato’s appearance (the cave) and reality
(the forms – essences). He will join together Aquinas’ faith and reason, all through an
20
Labarrière, in Hegel: l’esprit absolu, 171.
G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of World History, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1975), 124. Henceforth cited as IPWH. Compare Ecclesiastes 1:9,
Proverbs 612:20.
22
Hegel, IPWH, 124-125.
23
Dupré, in Hegel: l’esprit absolu, 177.
24
Remo Bodei, Hegel: l’esprit absolu, 165.
25
G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 13.
Hegel writes this in the preface, where he adds the well-quoted line: “The owl of Minerva spreads its
wings only with the falling of the dusk.”
21
50
appeal to intelligent reason, as opposed to intuition: intuition does not resolve tensions so
much as it dissolves them, as Hegel points out when he refers to the “night when all cows
are black.”26 Like Herder, Hegel acknowledges: “in the child’s progress through school,
we shall recognise the history of the cultural development of the world traced, as it were,
in a silhouette.”27
Hegel does not overtly mention particular cultures as he describes the unfolding of
consciousness, and some of his sections deal with phenomena that seem to have no
connection to a specific cultural ethos. While the Romans will inspire more than one
section in the Phenomenology, other sections are inspired by Sophocles’ Antigone, by
Hegel’s knowledge of nature-worshipping faiths, by Hegel’s understanding of the
Catholicism of his time, by the concept of phrenology, by the empiricism of early
scientific development, by Rousseau’s idea of the “general will” and by the French
Revolution, by the morality of the Protestant culture of Hegel’s age, and by the ethical
life of the Greek Polis, among other things. Within each sub-section, the subject-object
dimension takes on various meanings and provides a ground for the resolution of
tensions. Hegel often includes three “moments” in the unravelling of a particular ethos or
sub-section.
At the same time, Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, for instance, echoes the dynamics of
any number of cases in history where peoples have been subjugated to another people’s
advantage. Who, as time lapses, becomes more politically powerful: the coloniser, or the
subdued? Who holds the reigns during the inevitable subsequent cultural atonement: the
former slave-owners, or the former slaves? With whom does God side in the religious
literature of the Occidental world: the Pharaoh, or Moses’ Jews? Who grips the
imagination of citizens afloat in a decadent era: the Roman gladiator, or the Christian
martyr? Who holds power in any time of serious disarray or upheaval? The gentle
people in their refined homes, or the impoverished riff-raff who are the only ones who
26
Hegel, Preface to PhG, §16. These observations are owed to Professor M. Jenkins of St. Thomas More
College at the University of Saskatchewan.
27
Hegel, Preface to PhG, §28.
51
know how to provide the necessities of life and procure the things that become scarce
during years of trial?
Also, Hegel’s observation of sense-certainty addresses so many questions of import
for modern science, psychology, sociology, and even mathematics. What is the “Now”?
What is the “Here”? Are we ever really taking up the same space; do we ever stand in a
fixed moment in time? How long did it take the “scientists” to discover that, as Hegel
expresses in a slightly more advanced language, “there is no fixed moment in time”?
Zeno’s paradox,28 so long a challenge for the mathematicians (who deal exclusively,
according to Hegel, with “magnitude,” the “unessential distinction” that “does not touch
the thing itself”), is resolved in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel elaborates on
the limits of mathematics: “The evident character of this defective cognition of which
mathematics is so proud, and on which it plumes itself before philosophy, rests solely on
the poverty of its purpose and the defectiveness of its stuff.”29
And what about the notion of desire? For Hegel, it was always clear that desire
consumes man more than he can ever consume what he desires. Sociologists discuss the
“new” consumer society, and psychologists discuss the motives that drive human beings
to act as they do, but Hegel has built on the rich tradition of philosophy to discuss these
features of existence, not as separate phenomena that can be thought of in categories, nor
as fixed truths that are “positive and dead,” but as elements in the organic life of rational
human beings in the universe. These elements are part of a “whole” that cannot do
without them because they are the content of history’s subconscious, and must be
understood for the development of consciousness in history to come to fruition, as it
must, in the mind of the true philosopher. As a man is liberated when the labyrinths of
his inner life are gradually elucidated through psychoanalysis, the philosopher of any era
is freed to perceive the “whole” when he has considered the path through which the
28
In one of Zeno’s famous paradoxes, Achilles cannot outrace a tortoise to whom he has allowed a ten
metre head start, because when he catches up to where the tortoise started, the tortoise has already moved
ahead of that position, and every time Achilles catches up to the new position of the tortoise, the tortoise
has already moved ahead of that position, ad infinitum.
29
Hegel, Preface to PhG, §45.
52
“subject” that is consciousness comes to know itself. Hegel’s approach is to discover
“from the ground up” how human interaction with the surrounding world and with other
human beings begins and ends: his refusal to order history superficially by imposing an
outside standard, or to begin with assumptions that have no direct relation to our earthly
experience, permits him to show how the levels of discovery progress in the mind
regardless of what time-lines they may take up in history.
On his part, Frederick C. Beiser makes a distinction
between two standards of truth in Hegel’s philosophy of history. The first
standard of truth determines whether a philosophy adequately expresses the spirit
of its age, whether it is true in describing its characteristic values and beliefs. [...]
The second standard is the universal goal of world history, the self-consciousness
of freedom. It is this standard that allows Hegel to speak of a universal truth amid
all the change of world history. [...] The philosophies that express these cultures
will therefore have different degrees of truth according to the degree to which
their culture achieves or approximates the goal of universal history.30
Beiser makes an important point, but if the focus remains on the self-consciousness of
freedom as a goal or end-point of history, Hegel falls into the pile of thinkers inspired by
the Enlightenment who could not see past their own noses, but conjectured about what
would constitute the end of history. The question of whether Hegel’s “Absolute
knowing” ends history is the question of whether Hegel is a relevant thinker for the
modern age: the whole Phenomenology of Spirit leads up to Absolute knowing in a way
that cannot be ignored.
Remo Bodei proposes that the interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy as one that ends
history is not accurate. He finds evidence that Hegel means to leave room for new
developments once Absolute Knowing has been obtained. There are signs that Hegel
wants Absolute Knowing and philosophical science to be a way of “speaking clearly to
all.”31 Charles Taylor, though, questions whether Hegel’s philosophy is in fact so
30
31
Beiser, 281-282.
Remo Bodei, in Hegel: l’esprit absolu, 79. Bodei argues: “Hegel simply says that philosophy has no
other task than to explain what is already present. One could thus, with this image of a modest Hegel,
fight the image that is still presented, that of Kojève or Bloch, of a Hegel who ends history: the Absolute
as the end of history; Hegel has said everything, now we have nothing left to say. No! Hegel simply says
53
modest.32 Taylor suggests that Hegel’s whole interpretation of history, which is supposed
to culminate in “Comprehended History,” would be cast into doubt if it were really
possible (in Hegel’s scheme) for a new phase of history to develop, since a new
interpretation of the past would come along with this new phase.
Taylor forgets, though, that Hegel does not judge those phases according to the
standard of any particular time: he is searching for the undercurrents that pull history in
its various directions. Although a “post-modern” thinker might consider the Roman era
to be brutal and repulsive, Hegel would say that it offered a unique outlook for
consciousness in which an essential dialectic was resolved and carried over into the next
phase. Hegel would say this is the case whether or not the ethos of the contemporary
time is amenable to such a conclusion. And, as far as the “science” of philosophy is
concerned, it does not matter particularly if one lives in ancient Athens or in
contemporary times: Hegel’s Phenomenology is to philosophy what the concrete laws of
the universe are to modern science, or what Freud’s ground-breaking forays into
psychoanalysis are to the practise of psychology. One might ask how an ancient Greek
could know the truth behind Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit if he lived far before it was
ever written. For Hegel, that is like asking whether the rules of the universe existed
before scientists discovered them, or whether people had a subconscious before they were
ever aware of it.
Time is arbitrary insofar as the “whole” is concerned; what Hegel has discerned in his
Phenomenology is meant to sustain philosophy until the end of time: it is the product of a
man who uses the human capacity to reason to its fullest potential. How much history
had actually transpired at the point of the writing of the Phenomenology of Spirit is
that now, after having attained comprehension of one’s own era, one has to start over again, one has to
leave an open space. One has to leave room for the new. I also find a confirmation in a letter to von
Raumer from 1816 where Hegel says that philosophy is simply the possibility of speaking to everyone
with a clear format.”*
32
Taylor, in Hegel: l’esprit absolu, 83. Taylor says to this effect: “You have both spoken of Hegel’s
modesty; it was perhaps with a touch of humour. There is no philosophy more presumptuous, precisely
because it pretends to refuse that opposition [between subject and object]. There are many ways to
present it, but let us choose for the time being the following one: between finite spirit and infinite Spirit,
there is no hiatus. Does that not justify the interpretations that you mentioned, of Kojève and others, that
speak of the end of history?”*
54
merely how much of the content of the whole was necessary in order for a man of
Hegel’s mental prowess to be able to “comprehend” history. The standpoint that could
be considered that of Hegel’s time (presumably the one in which history is finally
“comprehended”) is not really that of Hegel’s time at all. How many people in Hegel’s
time would he judge to have “comprehended” history in the manner outlined in his
Phenomenology of Spirit? If Hegel means “Comprehended History” to indicate an
understanding of the subconscious movement of human consciousness throughout
history, an understanding that surpasses that of mere science and sheer faith and moves
into the realm of the true “science” of philosophy, then would any age be able to claim
exclusive right to it? This is how Hegel would seem to avoid entangling himself in the
web of his own time, and why he would say that even if other as yet unknown phases
develop, they might merely be digested into his “science” of philosophy as
manifestations of so many already experienced lower forms of consciousness, and
“Comprehended History” as he understood it might remain intact.
Of course, Taylor is right that the current consciousness is bound to affect the
philosopher’s view of the past. Hegel might agree with him in part, but would add that
philosophers still have a responsibility to look over their shoulders at the dissolved eras
— if they care to understand the past, and through it, the present. The “real” philosopher
must do this in order to ascertain what consciousness itself is, and how it came to be what
it is: through this, he will discover that Hegel’s is (of course) the highest form of
consciousness, the most complex and simultaneously the most simple (and truthful) way
of understanding the world. Ultimately, this means that he will move through the stages
from the most basic sense-certainty to “cut and dried” scientific discovery, and finally to
the high regions of religion and art, and beyond into the light of philosophy.
Beiser explains how Hegel, though he admired the original historians Thucydides and
Herodotus, found their historical reports lacking in “universal perspective.” On the other
hand, reflective historians, although they had a more “universal perspective,” imposed
“the view of the author upon the past.” Fundamentally, Hegel wishes to “cancel the
55
weakness, and preserve the strengths, of original and reflective history.”33 In the
meantime, Herder expresses a similar understanding of how best to study history: “When
philosophy is guided by history and history is enlivened by philosophy, then it is doubly
entertaining and useful.”34
Isaiah Berlin claims that Herder and Hegel part company, however, when it comes to
the necessity of evil within the unfolding of history. According to Berlin, Herder is more
of a humanitarian thinker than Hegel, since he argues against cultural hegemony and
imperial conquest. But in fact, Herder’s position on the necessity of violence in history is
not very different from Hegel’s. It is true that Herder asks of history’s reformers:
“[H]ave the consequences of their deeds, especially the unforeseen ones, all been
unequivocal blessing for their successors? Anyone familiar with the ensuing history will
surely have his doubts.”35 But, in response to the “gentle philosopher” who wonders
whether these reformations could “have occurred without revolutions,” he writes:
such a quiet progression [the one without revolutions] of the human spirit for the
improvement of the world is hardly anything other than a phantom in our heads,
never God’s course in nature. This seed falls to the earth: there it lies and grows
stiff, but now comes the sun to awaken it; it bursts open, its vessels swelling
violently asunder; it breaks out of the soil – thus the blossom, thus the fruit!36
Likewise, Hegel does not pause to consider which acts in history are not morally
acceptable. This is not, however, because Hegel chooses merely to overlook violence,
but rather because he has taken to heart Herder’s exhortations not to judge each culture or
period by an outside standard. If a culture is violent, then Hegel will judge it according
to its own warring standard. If the master wishes to subdue the slave, Hegel will find out
whether the slave is in fact subdued, and whether the master is indeed his master. Rather
than wring his hands over violence, Hegel tries to discover why it occurs, and what
developments in human consciousness explain the nature and level of violence as it
waxes or wanes throughout human history. This way Hegel can explain how men have
33
Beiser, 283.
Herder, “Of the Changes in the Tastes of the Nations through the Ages,” in AP, 102.
35
Herder, AP, 93.
36
Herder, AP, 47.
34
56
always fallen short of the transitory ideals they set out for themselves, and that in one
sense, the only valuable ideal is that man should survey history after it has blindly
occurred, and assess it reasonably.
Hegel’s disregard for human suffering is in fact necessary if history is to be
considered as a development within human consciousness, as it is exposed in the
Phenomenology of Spirit. In discussing “the role of evil in the light of the absolute
sovereignty of reason,” Hegel notes: “Reason cannot stop to consider the injuries
sustained by single individuals, for particular ends are submerged in the universal end.”37
He is not arguing that “the ends justify the means,” but rather that there is something
taking place that “cannot stop” in a very practical way: it is occurring within human
thought and within the process of “becoming” Spirit that is human consciousness.
Herder and Hegel are in agreement that history is, in Hegel’s famous words, a
“slaughter-bench.”38 Herder expresses it, like Hegel, in the context of necessity:
“Fortune will reach its destination, even over millions of corpses!”39 Hegel’s wish to
explain historical evils stems from Herder’s insistence:
Nothing could be further from my mind than to defend the endless massmigrations and devastations, the vassals’ wars and feuds, the armies of monks, the
pilgrimages and crusades: I only wish to explain them, [to show] how Spirit
breathes in everything, after all!40
Both Hegel and Herder would say that it is naive to portray history as a process in
which necessity plays no part. While wars, crusades, and revolutions are not inevitable,
they do not occur randomly. There are always reasons why history unfolds the way it
does. It is not the case that history occurs as if pre-planned; still, the present would not
be what it was if it were not for how things had gone in the past. As Herder puts it:
37
Hegel, IPWH, 43. Beiser notes that “in Hegel, the philosophy of history usurps the traditional function
of a theodicy: it explains the existence of evil by showing it to be necessary for the realisation of the end
of history.” (Beiser, “Hegel’s Historicism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, 271)
38
G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of World History, trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis and
Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1988), 24.
39
Herder, AP, 88.
40
Herder, AP, 42.
57
The basis of every reformation has always been just such a tiny seed that fell quietly
to the ground and was hardly worth mentioning. People had long possessed it: they
were looking at it but giving it no heed – yet now it was supposed to alter
inclinations, customs, a world of habits, to create them all anew! How is this
possible without revolution, without passion and movement?41
The development of consciousness is connected for both Herder and Hegel to
Christianity. Herder argues in anticipation of Hegel that Christianity is the “universal”
religion.42 Christianity “commands the purest humanity on the purest path.” It does so
not “as an object of speculation,” but rather “as a provider of the light and life of
humanity, through model example and loving deed, through progressively effective
community.”43 Hegel would agree entirely that “deed” and “progressively effective
community” are crucial factors in the development of reason.
For both Herder and Hegel, Christianity “was only ever able and meant to permeate
[rather than displace] everything”; they do not see how “divine undertakings” could be
conceived “in the world and the human realm other than by worldly and human driving
forces.” Any other kind of conception of the divine seems to Herder to be “made for the
abstractions of the utopian poet rather than those of the natural philosopher.” Herder
asks:
When has the deity ever acted, anywhere in the whole analogy of nature, other
than through nature? And is it therefore any less deity — or is it deity precisely
by pouring itself out over everything, by manifesting itself so uniformly and
inscrutably through every age according to that age, and likewise on every
continent, in every nation!44
Herder implies here Hegel’s argument that God’s purpose is manifested through history
and through the development of human consciousness.
Similarly, throughout the Introduction to the Philosophy of World History, Hegel
points out why he thinks Christianity offers a key to the Revelation that will occur in
history. Of course, for Hegel, philosophy takes primacy of place in that
41
Herder, AP, 47-48.
Herder, AP, 36. Isaiah Berlin mentions Herder’s belief that Christianity transcends the particular and
encourages the “worship of what is universal and eternal.” (Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment,” in
The Proper Study of Mankind, 372)
43
Herder, PW, 424.
44
Herder, AP, 37, 38.
42
58
[w]hat a religion grasps as a living relationship by means of representational
thought is grasped by philosophy by means of rational representation, so that the
content remains the same but appears in the latter instance in its highest,
worthiest, and most vivid form. Philosophy is the highest means by which a
nation can attain consciousness of the truth and realise the absolute mode of the
Spirit.45
In the meantime, Hegel argues that Spirit seeks to attain knowledge and “to create a
spiritual world in accordance with its own concept, to fulfil and realise its own nature,
and to produce religion and the state in such a way that it will conform to its own
concept.” This, says Hegel, “is the universal goal of the Spirit and of history; and just as
the seed bears within it the whole nature of the tree and the taste and form of its fruits, so
also do the first glimmerings of Spirit contain virtually the whole of history.”46
Hegel has latched on to Herder’s vision of the “Spirit that is too great for the frame of
its age,” the Spirit that “sows in the dark.” For Herder, this Spirit is the “pure,
incorruptible source of life,”47 and it is through the medium of humanity rather than
because of humanity that this Spirit will nurture beautiful fruit. In Hegel’s scheme, the
role of human beings is enhanced.
Herder states an idea that translates into the format of Hegel’s Phenomenology of
Spirit, in which the reader sees the whole Bacchanalian revel, or watches the cunning of
reason operate “behind the back” of consciousness. Herder suggests that God may have a
“greater overall plan than what an individual creature is able to comprehend” since “all
the scenes, in which every single actor” merely plays his part, “together make a whole, a
major presentation of which the individual, self-centred actor cannot know or see
anything, but which the spectator with the right perspective, in calm anticipation of the
complete sequence, can indeed see.”48 In his essay Of the Changes in the Tastes of the
Nations through the Ages, Herder admits that while gathering together “the many
45
Hegel, IPWH, 113. Hegel judges rather arbitrarily that “[c]oncrete philosophy can only occur among the
Greeks and the Christians, whereas abstract philosophy can also be found among the Orientals, who do
not, however, achieve a synthesis between the finite and the divine.” [IPWH, 113]
46
Hegel, IPWH, 53.
47
Herder, AP, 92.
48
Herder, AP, 72.
59
changes of the past” the philosopher may be excused for his “audacious look ahead,”
even though the realities of the future may very well “be the results of change behind our
backs: so things changed before us, so they will change after us.”49 For Hegel, this
process will provide Spirit with knowledge of itself,50 while Herder sees “seeds that begin
with a small germ, like all God’s works and creations, yet whose first, tiny shoots already
reveal, by their lovely appearance and smell, their special future as God’s concealed
creation.”51
Herder’s conception of time is related to Hegel’s, since Herder conceives of time “as
the notion that is implicit in his concept of Kraft.” Herder’s Kraft — force, or Spirit — is
in turn defined as a “process in time.” Herder sees Kraft as “a stream of continuous
change”: “reality is a flux of change” and “time is of its very essence.”52 For Hegel,
meanwhile, history is “the development of Spirit in Time, as Nature is the development of
the Idea in Space.”53
The particular kind of Revelation that Herder and Hegel discern corroborates the links
that exist between their philosophies of history. Herder presumes that each historical
period yields a foundation for the next stage, in a way that recalls Hegel’s progression of
stages, in which (sometimes surprising) “truths” are carried into each subsequent level of
development. Herder writes:
No one is alone in his age; he builds on what has come before, which turns into
and wants to be nothing but the foundation of the future — thus speaks the
analogy in nature, the talking image of God in all works! Evidently it is so with
the human race! The Egyptian could not exist without the Oriental; the Greek
built upon them, the Roman lifted himself atop the back of the entire world —
true progression, progressing development, even if none in particular were to
benefit from it! It enters into the great! It becomes something of which the
history of empty hulls boasts so much and of which it shows so little: the stage
for a guiding intention on earth!54
49
Herder, “Of the Changes in the Tastes of the Nations through the Ages,” in AP, 103.
Hegel, PhG, §808.
51
Herder, AP, 92.
52
Barnard, 46.
53
Hegel, IPWH, 128.
54
Herder, AP, 31.
50
60
In Another Philosophy of History, Herder seems to ask a direct question that Hegel
has answered with his Phenomenology of Spirit. Herder asks:
If I could succeed in binding together the most disparate scenes without
entangling them, to show how they are mutually related, growing out of one
another, losing themselves in each other, all only moments in the particular, mere
means towards a purpose through progression — what a view! What a noble
application of human history! What encouragement to hope, to action, to belief,
even where one sees nothing or does not see everything.55
Of course, Hegel does think that he “sees everything.” Hegel responds to Herder’s urge
to view history, the world, and the world’s parts as a whole, all somehow being overseen
by Providence. However, for Hegel, the role of human beings will be much more
evidently important for the development of history than it is for Herder, for how could it
be otherwise in light of the existence of reason?
For Herder, the determinants of historical continuity are manifested “in a twodimensional manner: ‘horizontally,’ insofar as at any given time a number of factors
exercise upon each other a reciprocal influence; ‘vertically,’ insofar as by succeeding
each other they influence the course of events in a particular direction.”56 At the same
time, for Hegel, the “science” of philosophy is far superior to the “rapturous haziness” of
the kind of theory that “supposes that it is staying right in the centre and in the depths”
and that “looks disdainfully at determinateness.” Such depth and breadth is “empty,” an
“intensity without content” that cannot be distinguished from “superficiality.”57 In
contrast, Hegel’s “science” of philosophy will seek out depth and breadth authentically.
Herder interprets Revelation to mean “the attainment of a clearer understanding”:
“[T]he purest form of Revelation ... is to see things as they really are: without images;58
55
Herder, AP, 32.
Barnard, 119.
57
Hegel, preface to PhG, §10.
58
Herder uses a term here that evokes Hegel’s “picture-thinking.” (Hegel, PhG, §764-765) Herder writes:
“Can there be any general image without mutual subordination and integration, or any broad perspective
without elevation? When you keep your face close to the picture, fumbling with this splinter or groping
at that speck of colour, you will never see the entire image — you will see anything but an image! And
when your head is full of a group with which you have become infatuated, would your sight be able to
grasp the whole of such alternating ages, to impose order on them, to pursue them gently? To isolate
only the main causes underlying each scene, to follow the currents quietly, and then — to name them?
56
61
without delusions, face to face.”59 Revelation does not occur in one swoop; rather, it is a
continuous “process.”60 Hegel shares this understanding, and his Phenomenology of
Spirit reports that “continuous process” insofar as Hegel has been able to determine it.
For Hegel, it is clear that God intends for us to know: He would not have initiated this
process if it were not meant to be filled out, to come full circle. For it to come full circle
does not mean that it must end in a cul-de-sac: a circle can be an infinite ring of
Revelation that is defined more by process than by direction and that can be understood
regardless of how its content evolves.
It is not by mere chance that the movement in the Phenomenology of Spirit from
consciousness to self-consciousness is described in terms of the “curtain [of appearance]
hanging before the inner world” being “drawn away.”61 The Phenomenology of Spirit
unfolds from consciousness to self-consciousness, to reason, to Spirit, to religion
(consciousness of Spirit), and finally to Absolute Knowing (self-consciousness of
Spirit);62 the whole progression constitutes a painstaking apo-kalupsis (apocalypse:
uncovering, Revelation).
But if you are not able to do any of this — if history flickers and flares before your eyes, a welter of
scenes, peoples, and ages — then read first and learn to see! I know, by the way, like you, that every
general image, every general concept, is nothing but abstraction. The Creator alone is the one who
conceives the full unity of any one and of all nations, in all their great diversity, without thereby losing
sight of their unity.” (Herder, AP, 26)
59
Compare Herder, AP, 97: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in
part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three;
but the greatest of these is charity.” Compare 1 Cor. 13:12-13.
60
Barnard, 89.
61
Hegel, PhG, §165.
62
Hegel, PhG, §679.
62
CHAPTER III
GOD IN HISTORY
Herder may have retained the notion of a transcendent God on whom men are utterly
dependent, irking Hegel to a certain extent, but they shared some understanding of God’s
role in history. Both argued (Herder, implicitly, and Hegel, explicitly) that God is only
interesting to humans insofar as He is intelligible, or “knowable,” and that He is
intelligible through our human awareness and capacity to reason and communicate.
Insofar as He acts through our reason, we can know Him, and whatever existence He may
have that is outside of our reach and cannot be known, is null and void for us. For Hegel,
whatever God is, is our reason, and insofar as we have reason, we have God. There is no
ambiguity in Hegel’s thought about the meaning of the human capacity for knowledge. It
is entirely possible for humans to know, and they will know philosophically, however
differently they may have been trained to think. At the same time, what is known is
precisely “comprehended History,”1 the very history that Herder wishes to see better
understood.
At bottom, Hegel is elaborating the ideas of Herder, who sometimes argues that God
is immanent, or that He works “through man and nature to advance the cause of
1
Hegel, PhG, §808.
63
mankind.”2 Herder writes, for instance: “Religion is meant to accomplish nothing but
purposes for human beings, through human beings.”3 While Hegel demonstrates more
explicitly his faith that meaning can be found in man’s history, Herder also upholds a
vision
wider than that philosophy which mixes up top and bottom, which only ever
clarifies particular confusions here and there, turning everything into a game of
ants, into a striving of individual inclinations and forces without purpose, into a
chaos where one despairs of virtue, purpose, and deity!4
For Herder, God had to be transcendent in order for the existence of man to have any
meaning. The framework that God’s existence provides does not merely enhance the
notion of relativism through which Herder gives each cultural group its own “centre,” but
also counteracts the claim to cultural superiority that any of these groups might make
upon having stepped into the spotlight of history. For Herder, this counteraction is aimed
at the thinkers of the European Enlightenment, but it is a counteraction that puts any
culture, even any overtly Christian culture, in its place. The implication is that relativism
on its own cannot counteract the insolence of a self-centred cultural group, since who is
to say that there cannot be dominant cultural groups at the political level even if at the
theoretical level cultures are considered equal. In other words, if cultures are simply
relative, what argument is there to dissuade the cultural group that includes among its
central “tenets” a notion that it is superior to others? To say: “I’m sorry, but you are
simply not special, because there are many other cultural groups on the Earth that think
they are special too...” is not to convince anyone. The responder might say: “Well, if
everything is relative, then who are you to tell me the ‘centre’ on which my culture is
based is wrong?” The only thing that can give relativism “bite” is the historical outlook
of the believer in a transcendent God: time will destroy all cultures, because history has a
purpose that lies beyond that of human beings, whatever it may be. If there is no sense of
an outside “moral” standard, or as Emerson would put it, a sense of “the ground of this
2
Ioannis Evrigenis, Introduction to Herder, AP, xxx.
Herder, AP, 38.
4
Herder, AP, 32.
3
64
uneasiness of ours, of this old discontent” (“the universal sense of want and ignorance,
but the fine innuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claims”5), then there is no
real basis for questioning our own piddling, but sometimes vital-seeming ends.
Likewise, for Hegel, God could not be merely immanent or else the development of
reason would be the actualisation of nothing: the necessity that is vindicated in Absolute
knowing begins with the seed of God’s impetus. The “circle that presupposes its end as
its goal”6 could not presuppose such a thing if the universe and the development of life
were a random occurrence, that is to say, not a necessary one. But Hegel rejects the most
traditional theological definition of “God,” namely the one that explains Him as what
men are not, by arguing that this kind of “Subject” is a “fixed point” and that
“anticipation” of its existence “posits the subject as an inert point, whereas the actuality is
self-movement.”7 Unlike Herder, Hegel argues that for the actualisation of man’s full
capacities for reason, God is dependent on man. Hegel sees that the notion of a
transcendent God often provides men with an excuse not to think logically about the
world. For Hegel, this is paradoxical, since God clearly intended for man to develop his
capacity for knowledge (whatever the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden may
say), and since there is no good reason why men cannot aim for the highest level of
understanding: the one that crosses all cultural and religious boundaries, the one that
links apparently mutually exclusive cultural groups across the ages, namely, that of
philosophy. If it is through philosophy that history can best be understood, then it is
towards philosophy that the constant “unease” of Emerson ultimately leads: it is towards
philosophical truth that “Spirit” aims, and it is in the practise of philosophy that man
comes closest to God. For Herder and for Hegel man understands best his destiny when
he sets aside his preformed cultural thoughts, his assumptions, and his abstractions, and
when he feels the significance of the historical chain on which he represents but a small
link.
5
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” in Emerson’s Essays (New York: Gramercy Books, 1993),
140.
6
Hegel, PhG, §18.
7
Hegel, PhG, §23.
65
This is where the influence of Enlightenment thought on Herder and Hegel is clear:
reason is all-powerful, and it represents the divine within us. History does unfold
according to Providence, but that very Providence finds fruition in the development of
our consciousness and in our capacity for reason.
Herder’s expression of God’s role in history is, like his whole philosophy of history
and his whole body of work, self-contradictory. There are two semi-conflicting
implications of Herder’s belief in Revelation: the first that religion has experienced a
decline in history until Christianity; the second that the idea of Redemption is secularised
into a “theory of progress that retraces the collective Salvation of the species.” Rouché
argues that “Christianity and the cult of the national spirits wage a battle in Herder’s
thought that is perpetually restarted, and in which there will be no victor, but one
vanquished: the orthodoxy.” Rouché cites Helmut Groos when he writes: “Christianity
with Herder only keeps its value as an absolute religion through ceasing to be
Christianity. Identified with the ideal of Humanität, it ceases in effect to be: A) a
scriptural religion; B) a religion of Salvation.” Herder indeed calls every feature of
Christianity that lies outside the core value of Humanität mere “shell,” or “envelope,” or
“husk.”8
What Herder accomplishes is to fuse Christian values with reason and with nature by
rejecting dogmas and certain supernatural elements. Rouché argues that Herder
secularised the concepts of Revelation, of Redemption, and of a chosen people in
history.9 The traditional Salvation that Herder supports through his theory of gradual
Revelation and Education by God is challenged when Herder dismisses the notion of
Christ as saviour and eliminates the need for Redemption by failing to believe in the Fall
of man.10 Unwittingly, Herder contributes to the dismantling of Lutheran orthodoxy.
8
Rouché, 131, 321, 479.*
Rouché, 115, 480. Rouché also mentions that in the first part of the Ideas (a part dealing with natural
sciences) Herder laicises the concept of Incarnation by claiming that “each creature is the manifestation
of an ‘organizational force.’”*
10
Rouché, 481. Herder retains the traditional interpretation of the immortality of the soul, however,
arguing that the Resurrection was the most important event of Jesus’ whole existence, since it stands as
proof of the immortality of the human soul. (Rouché, 485)
9
66
Herder’s Ideas marks the waning of Herder’s Sturm und Drang, of the specific
alliance he had brokered between Christian thought and German nationalism: Herder’s
vision of gradual progression overtakes his nationalist inclinations, and resembles more
and more the secularisation of Christian ideals and the humanist values of the early
Enlightenment. Rouché suggests that Herder’s originality in fact lies in his reChristianisation of the concept of Progress that was conceived by the medieval mystics
and secularised by the thinkers of the early Enlightenment, and which takes the shape of
Herder’s Fortgang.
The “disdain for all belief received from the outside and not personally experienced,”
so common among both Aufklärer and Stürmer, was also a tenet of the medieval
mystics.11 In this spirit, Herder insists that religious enthusiasm must be an “exaltation of
human faculties” rather than a passive reception of God’s inspiration. Humanity is the
only species endowed with language in a way that makes reason, real freedom, religion,
and hope for immortality possible. The way in which Herder wishes to rely on
Providence is a manifestation of the “rationalist optimism” of Leibniz (as opposed to the
pessimist materialism of Holbach). Herder resents that man would be considered the
result of mere fatality or chance. While the Enlightenment was arguably an optimistic
phase in the history of thought, its rejection of faith could be construed as negative and
one-sided. Herder’s “rationalist optimism,” a response to the aspect of Enlightenment
thought that threatened faith in Europe, is also taken up by Hegel, albeit in a different
way.12
At moments, Herder shares with Spinoza a recognition that God, although He is not
“identical with the world,” is immanent in the world; that is to say that He appears
“indirectly, through [H]is opaque coat of creatures.” However, Herder is not a pantheist.
Herder writes: “God is not the world, and the world is not God; that is certain.” Herder
is a holist: he believes the spiritual and physical worlds are unified — he does not
11
Rouché, 134, 492.* Barnard comments as well on the “recourse” that was “increasingly had to
experience” in Herder’s time. (Barnard, 13)
12
Rouché, 206, 208, 376, 483.*
67
partake in the fully monist belief that there is only one being. Herder’s representation of
God’s role in history is often a traditional, Lutheran one. In Herder’s philosophy of
history for instance, the role of nature in forming nations resembles the role of Grace in
theology; “the predetermination of history by physical geography is the collective form of
Predestination.”13
For Herder, God is the common object of the natural and historical sciences, while
“the knowledge that explains the world” is the same as that knowledge which “saves the
soul.” Herder could not conceive of the divisions that are now taken for granted between
faith and reason, natural and historical sciences, and philosophy and theology. To be
frightened by the surrounding darkness of the universe is for Herder to forget that the
same force that “acts and thinks within me” is “as eternal as the one that keeps assembled
the suns and the stars.”14
Herder’s openness to the discoveries of science is evident when, in addressing
astrology in his Ideas, Herder echoes Galileo,15 whose (sometimes uncharacteristic)
humility and simultaneous hope comes across so clearly in his Letter to the Grand
Duchess Christina. Galileo defends Copernicus on the grounds that “[h]e did not ignore
the Bible, but he knew very well that if his doctrine were proved, then it could not
contradict the Scriptures when they were rightly understood.”16
Following his interest in the spirits of nations, Herder holds that faith must be adapted
to each distinct nation, and even to each individual believer. Herder is sympathetic to the
idea that the variations that form within Christianity as it takes root in different cultures
are legitimate. Herder also specifies that when a human being is inspired by God, he is
not “emptied of himself and traversed by the Spirit like an empty pipe.” The same could
be said for nations in the Herderian scheme, since the monolithic quality and
13
Rouché, 179, 180, 193.*
Rouché, 181, 182, 191, 209.* Furthermore, for Herder, the death of a human being is like the transition
from chrysalis to butterfly.
15
Rouché, 191.
16
Galileo, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, trans. Stillman Drake (New York: Anchor Books, 1957),
179-180 (italics added).
14
68
psychological ethos of Herder’s nations makes it easy to conceive of them as
personalities.
Within Herder’s thought, the Leibnizean notions of “force” and of “different degrees
of consciousness” are fused together. There is a “virtual” pantheistic dynamism to
Herder’s thought, especially with his suggestion of a “ladder” of creatures in nature that
replicates in material form the “degrees of consciousness” which develop in history.
Revelation is for Herder both “the goal of Creation, and consciousness of this goal.”
Both the progress in nature and the progress of consciousness in history represent
increasing closeness to God and to divinity, but the creationist element in Herder’s
thought ensures that his construct remain static. Although God does “‘become’
progressively in the consciousness of humanity,” He exists before it, and independently
of it. The progression (Fortgang, not Fortschritt) of humanity’s consciousness of God
“adds itself to” (rather than substitutes itself for) “the perfection already given by God.”
That said, all dynamism and movement in Herder’s scheme comes from his religious
framework. Herder seems to juxtapose Spinoza’s God on nature, and the God of the
Bible on history.17 It is the concept of gradual Revelation that imbues Herder’s
philosophy of history with anything beyond a creationist, static content.
Herder considers reason differently from the thinkers of the Enlightenment: his is the
reason of the Reformers, and of Saint Paul. These religious men divide reason into two
kinds, one kind being the Faustian reason of Goethe’s Mephisto, the other kind being the
reason of the Archangels of the “Prologue in the Sky.” The first is a reason that is
“darkened by sin,” while the second is “lit by Grace.” In deference to this last kind of
reason, Herder ends up sustaining a philosophy in which freedom is “directed” by God.
To obey God is to be free, and involves knowing God;18 in this sense, Herder echoes
Kant, for whom to know what is right is to do it, and to be free.
Rouché discerns that Herder’s value of Humanität is a link between Hamann’s
“theory of the Socratic daemon” and Hegel’s theory of a history in which God takes
17
18
Rouché, 199, 200, 235, 241, 333.*
Rouché, 236, 241.*
69
consciousness of Himself.19 This impetus for unorthodoxy comes from Herder’s
dismissal of Kant’s theory of radical evil. Herder argues that man’s essential nature is
good. There is no conflict between “human nature and the divine will; the kingdom of
God is possible on Earth.” Although Herder scorns the pride of Enlightenment thinkers,
he is himself an “intellectualist” since he believes that human intelligence must “serve the
advancement of humanity.” At the same time, Humanität and Christianity do not clash
within Herder’s mind.20
Herder dismisses Kant’s proposition that only the human beings in the last stage of
history can be redeemed. For Herder, it is clear that men can be redeemed regardless of
the stage of history during which they exist. The individual is free from the “march of
progress” insofar as his personal redemption is concerned; just as in Another Philosophy
of History, the happiness of each nation is not contingent on its status among nations and
within time.21
One of the differences between the will of God in Another Philosophy of History and
in the Ideas is that in the first, it is indiscernible by human beings, while in the second it
is discernible, and interior to humanity. Herder represents God at first as an “absolute
monarch,” but by the time he writes the Ideas, God has become a “constitutional
sovereign who has renounced arbitrariness.” With Herder’s earlier God, the human
capacity for reason is due to an intervention on the part of God; while with his later God,
the capacity for human reason comes about because of human freedom. The progress of
man’s history is at once necessary and free, since it depends both on the “essence of man
and of the world” and on human consciousness. This shift in Herder’s representation of
God also lightens God’s responsibility as far as the evil tendencies of human beings are
concerned. Nonetheless, at some level God remains for Herder a personal God.22
19
Rouché, 253.* Barnard calls Humanität the “doctrinal and emotional source” of Herder’s “secular faith.”
Rouché, 242, 253, 254.*
21
Rouché, 210.
22
Rouché, 383, 385, 388, 391, 394.* Barnard adds that Herder “never quite succeeded in disentangling
these problems, perhaps mainly because he acknowledged no real dichotomy between the realm of
natural philosophy and theology on the one hand, or, on the other, between a providential order and one
in which man was destined to play an essential and active part.” (Barnard, 83)
20
70
Herder’s work marks the time when the shedding of the “historical content of
religion” begins among the faithful.23 The “confessional forms” of religion are set aside,
while the new soil for the “ancient, revealed religion” is found in the realm of reason.24
F. M. Barnard relates the “religious re-orientation” of German Enlightenment thinkers to
the desire to “deepen man’s religious faith by a thorough re-appraisal of the origin and
nature of religion as such.”25
While Herder pared down traditionalist religion to a simple, irrational faith, he
proceeded to seek a foundation for that faith in reason, which was to question the
irrational remains to which he had reduced faith in the first place. According to Rouché,
Herder “strikes religion while aiming [his swing] at intolerance, because one cannot live
without the other. The maximum of critical reflection compatible with faith has been
surpassed.” By the third part of the Ideas, Herder appears as “an Aufklärer who would
remember having once belonged to the Sturm und Drang, and who would be Christian.”
At the same time, Herder prepares the way for Hegel by declaring rational “the integral
content of history.”26
While Herder is perfectly content to leave stones unturned and to leave “reason”
relatively undefined, Hegel will insist on scrutinizing every aspect of the developments
he will survey. The notion advanced by Hegel that God takes consciousness of Himself
through the development of humanity, is to Herder blasphemous.27 That said, and
although Herder often uses the term “reason” with derision, he also makes it clear that
“reason would be in a bad way if it were not reason everywhere, and the universal good
were not also the universally most useful. The magnetic needle of our effort seeks this
pole; after all wanderings and oscillations it will and must find it.”28
23
Rouché, 571.*
Rouché, 571.* Taylor points out that Hegel, unlike some of his Romantic contemporaries, insists that the
synthesis of subject and whole “be achieved through reason.” (Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society, 12)
25
Barnard, 13. Christian Wolff was partly responsible for this shift, since he introduced a philosophy in
which he aimed “at a compromise with orthodox theology,” and in which he “did not oppose Revelation
to reason.” (Barnard, 13)
26
Rouché, 444, 552, 571.*
27
Rouché, 231.
28
Herder, PW, 418.
24
71
The subtle hinge between Herder’s and Hegel’s positions is well illustrated by their
ever-so-slightly diverging statements on the source of philosophy. Herder writes in a
letter: “It is by the heavens that our philosophy must begin, not by the amphitheatre of
anatomy and the dissection of cadavers.”29 Hegel writes more cautiously that in the past,
“[t]he eye of the Spirit had to be forcibly turned and held fast to the things of this world,”
while “[n]ow we seem to need just the opposite,” since “[t]he Spirit shows itself as so
impoverished that, like a wanderer in the desert craving for a mouthful of water, it seems
to crave for its refreshment only the bare feeling of the divine in general.”30 At the same
time, Herder notices a similar thirst: “Before long, our age will open some eyes: soon
enough, it will drive us to seek out wells of ideas [to slake] the thirst of the desert.”31
Likewise, for Hegel Spirit “has not only lost its essential life; it is also conscious of this
loss” and will “turn away from the empty husks,” demanding of philosophy “the recovery
through its agency of that lost sense of solid and substantial being.”32
Where Herder leans over the precipice of unorthodoxy, Hegel actually jumps, but
never reaches the ground. Hegel’s philosophy of Christianity is suspended somewhere
between the idea of a transcendent God and that of pantheism.33 In one sense, Hegel’s
Christianity explains God in terms unheard-of before, but also in terms that seem oddly
harmonious: God is all-encompassing and yet somehow dependent on the success of the
human experience.
Louis Dupré explains that Hegel wished to connect his own secular era with the
religious transcendentalism of the past. For this, “[t]he secular world had to be integrally
29
Rouché, 191.*
Hegel, PhG, §8. Hegel’s depiction of the Spirit’s thirst is echoed much later by T.S. Eliot in the fifth
section of The Wasteland. Eliot writes: “Here there is no water but only rock,” repeating variations on
this during the first part of this section, where he is describing the Europe of his day. He refers to ruins,
to the song “London Bridge is Falling Down,” and conveys a sense of extreme aridness and
precariousness: “If there were the sound of water only/ Not the cicada/ And dry grass singing/ But sound
of water over a rock/ Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees/ Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop/
But there is no water”; and intones: “Falling towers/ Jerusalem Athens Alexandria/ Vienna London/
Unreal.” (T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland,” in Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1954), 64-67)
31
Herder, AP, 79.
32
Hegel, PhG, §7.
33
Taylor explains this as well, writing: “Hegel’s position was in a sense on a narrow crest between theism
and some form of naturalism or pantheism. The atmosphere was so rarefied on top that it was easy to fall
off, and remains so.” (Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society, 40)
30
72
assumed within a transcendent perspective.” Hegel wanted thought to be conceived
transcendentally so that the new age could develop its own religious dimension of
sorts.”34 Dupré’s argument captures well the spirit of what Hegel attempts in his
philosophy. He articulates the way in which for Hegel, “the manifestation of God as
Spirit forms only part of a process that involves both the infinite and the finite,” while
“that divine manifestation remains both the inspiring source and the moving principle of
the philosophy of Spirit.”35 Dupré finds that Hegel’s religious theory ends up merging
“what is Caesar’s with what is God’s.”36
The debate on Hegel’s specific understanding of God is one that often misses the
mark. Students of Hegel’s philosophy argue over whether Hegel implies that God is a
transcendent being who abides outside of human existence, or whether he would have
“God” exist immanently through the physical matter and intelligence of human beings.
These interpretations of Hegel place him either in the same category as Kant and other
philosophers who would argue that God is unknowable, or in the company of pantheists
and Romantics like Fichte and Schelling, who have been accused of positing some kind
of spirit in human existence only to avoid having a “dead” philosophy.37
But Hegel is trying to avoid these very distinctions by explaining that God is unified
with reality, and with human history, through reason. Hegel wants to erase the
philosophical categories of God’s transcendentalism, on the one hand, and God’s mere
immanence in human existence, on the other. He offers a philosophy that unites God and
man through history and through the development of reason in a way that fits neither the
category of God as transcendent, nor that of God as merely immanent. For Hegel, a
human existence without God cannot account for reason, while reason cannot be taken
34
Dupré, in Hegel: l’esprit absolu, 127.
Dupré, in Hegel: l’esprit absolu, 129. Dupré explains further: “Hegel’s theory of religion is based on
two theses: 1) The mind is able to mediate the finite with the infinite, because it partakes in Spirit. 2)
The finite mind constitutes the otherness that enables Spirit to know itself. The latter thesis had never
been fully accepted by Christian orthodoxy, even though it had enjoyed a long tradition in Christian
spirituality.” (Dupré, in Hegel: l’esprit absolu, 129-130)
36
Dupré, in Hegel: l’esprit absolu, 135.
37
These philosophers might be said to be blowing up their empty representations of mankind like balloons
with the Romantic helium of “spirit.”
35
73
seriously if God does not have a stake in its results: if God is Father, then the children of
God must have the opportunity to grow up, as implied in Herder’s scheme.
In his introduction to Hegel’s Introduction to the Philosophy of World History,
translated by H.B. Nisbet, Duncan Forbes shows a refined understanding of Hegel’s
religious viewpoint. He describes Hegel’s philosophy of history as “limited and tied
down, and yet unlimited and free-ranging; able to survey the whole of reality, it is final
and closed in one sense, wholly open in another, in a way that is not easy to grasp.”
Forbes argues that Hegel’s Geist can only “be fully self-conscious as the result of the
culmination of a process in time” — in the Europe of his day. This “fullness of time” is
“tied down to [Hegel’s] own age,” and yet in a sense it “transcends time and historical
specificity.” Classical misunderstandings of Hegel’s philosophy arise, according to
Forbes, when scholars ignore Hegel’s claim that the “content of his philosophy is
Christianity.” This clue, along with Hegel’s insistence that the “true infinite” is the
“unity of itself and the finite,” is essential to the understanding of Hegel’s philosophy.38
Hegel considers religion that is a “flight from the world” to be false, and seeks to
prove that in the union of divine and human, the divine remains “wholly divine” but for
that needs and remains “dependent on the human,” while the human remains “fully
human” but for that needs and depends “on the divine.” Forbes notes how Hegel wrote
in his early fragments that “[r]eason is analogous to love; both go out and lose themselves
but also find themselves in the other, in the Not-I.” Forbes cuts clearly through
misinterpretations in other respects as well, noting that Hegel never intended for his
philosophy to “shun or in any way devalue the objective world, of fact and contingency
and finitude, the historian’s world and the natural scientist’s world and the world of
every-day experience.” Rather, his goal is “to show how necessary all this is to the life of
Spirit.”39
38
Duncan Forbes, Introduction to Hegel’s Introduction to the Philosophy of World History, trans. H.B.
Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), viii-x. (This version is translated from the
German edition of Johannes Hoffmeister, who took notes from Hegel’s lectures on the topic.)
39
Ibid., x.
74
Hegel says in his lectures on the Introduction to the Philosophy of World History that
concrete events “are the ways of Providence, the means it uses, the phenomena in which
it manifests itself in history; they are open to our inspection.” Not only is he confident
that man can know God, but he argues that this is “our highest duty,” alongside that of
loving God. For Hegel, the claim that man cannot know God is nothing short of
blasphemy, since it is not in line with “the Scriptural saying that the Spirit leads into
truth, searches all things, and penetrates even into the deep things of God.”40 Hegel
rejects outright the distinction that is often made between faith and knowledge and
wonders how they could have come to be commonly accepted as opposites. He calls this
distinction “an empty one,” since to have faith in something is ultimately to know it and
be convinced of it. On the other hand, Hegel rejects equally the notion that man connects
most profoundly with God through feeling: “It is a trivial commonplace that man is
distinguished from the animals by his ability to think, yet this is something which is often
forgotten.”41 Hegel differs from Herder in his disdain for feeling, which he considers
detrimental to reason.42
Hegel insists that although the “data of consciousness, all products and objects of
thought — and above all religion and morality” come to man primarily “through the
medium of feeling,” this is the “lowest form” they can take;43 with Christianity, however,
“the time has come in which this conviction and inner certainty need no longer remain a
mere representation, but can also be thought, developed, and recognised as a definite
piece of knowledge.” Hegel explains that the “spiritual principle which we call God is
40
Hegel, IPWH, 36. Hegel later notes that “[t]he understanding of the modern age has made God into an
abstraction, into something that lies beyond the self-consciousness of man, into a bare iron wall against
which man can only beat his head in vain. But the ideas of reason are totally different from the
abstractions of the understanding.” (Hegel, IPWH, 106)
41
Hegel, IPWH, 39, 41.
42
Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society, 20.
43
A little later on, Hegel clarifies that “if we see someone kneeling in prayer before an idol, and the content
of his prayer is contemptible in the eyes of reason, we can still respect the feelings which animate it and
acknowledge that they are just as valuable as those of the Christian who worships truth in symbolic form,
or of the philosopher who immerses himself in eternal truth through rational thought. Only the objects of
such feelings are different; but the feelings themselves are one and the same.” (Hegel, IPWH, 45) That
the feelings are the same means in this case, for Hegel, that feeling does not discriminate sufficiently,
unlike reason.
75
none other than the truly substantial, inherently and essentially individual and subjective
truth. It is the source of all thought, and its thought is essentially creative; we encounter
it as such in world history.”44
What Hegel is concerned with as he develops his official philosophy of history is the
“Idea of human freedom.” But the way in which he frames this quest echoes his general
theme of trying to unify the divine with the human. He urges us to
consider world history in relation to its ultimate end; this ultimate end is the
intention that underlies the world. We know that God is the most perfect being;
He is therefore able to will only Himself and that which is of the same nature as
Himself. God and the nature of the divine will are one and the same thing; it is
what we call in philosophy the Idea. Thus it is the Idea in general that we have to
consider, and particularly its operation within the medium of the human Spirit; in
more specific terms, it is the Idea of human freedom.45
Hegel considers that Christianity has offered “a revelation of God’s spiritual nature.”
This is represented as the third “person” within the Trinity: the Holy Spirit. While God
the Father is conceived as “a power [that] is universal but as yet enclosed within
Himself,” and the Christ is the Father’s “own object, another version of Himself,” the
Spirit “is the whole, and not just one or another of the elements in isolation.” In the Son,
who is “just as immediate an expression of [God] as He is Himself,” God “knows
Himself and contemplates Himself” — and it is this self-knowledge and selfcontemplation that constitutes the third element, Spirit.46
The progression of world history is the uncovering of freedom within human
consciousness, and the spirits involved include the “spirit of the nation” (reminiscent of
Herder), which is both particular and universal, since it includes many individuals, and
the “world Spirit,” which is “the Spirit of the world as it reveals itself through the human
consciousness; the relationship of men to it is that of single parts to the whole which is
44
Hegel, IPWH, 40.
Hegel, IPWH, 46.
46
Hegel, IPWH, 51. Hegel later adds that “[t]he Christian Incarnation is not presented in an
anthropomorphic form unworthy of the deity, but points instead to the true Idea of God.” (IPWH, 106)
45
76
their substance.” The world Spirit “corresponds to the divine Spirit, which is the
Absolute Spirit,” or “God,” who “appears in everyone’s consciousness.”47
Quentin Lauer reminds us that Hegel’s God is concrete. The abstract God is not
cancelled out in Hegel’s sight, but rather, realised.48 Lauer’s interpretation sheds light on
the tricky aspect of Hegel’s work: the holist aspect. It is hard for a modern thinker to see
how Hegel does not slip into pantheism on the one hand, and how he simultaneously
rejects a purely transcendent God, on the other. These are the two familiar categories,
and they are the categories considered by traditional and modern scholars alike. But
Hegel seeks to avoid both.49
In reference to Hegel’s statement “ohne Welt ist Gott nicht Gott,” Lauer argues that
Hegel could very well mean that “without a world God is not God”; but “since one
cannot hypothesise that there is no world, one cannot hypothesise that there is no God.”50
Hegel is not saying that taking away the world would mean taking away God, but that
God is only God to anyone if the world exists. Here he means our world, and, more
fundamentally, us. The argument interpreted this way is incontestable, and it is not
controversial in the way that modern and traditional thinkers might assume. It is
controversial because it is a holist position. What exists is what is interesting for Hegel,
and according to him, nothing exists that cannot be discovered. To say that God exists
but that He exists for us is controversial because it joins together what has long been
separated in the minds of philosophers, namely heaven and earth. Kant had not breached
this barrier, since he ended up resorting to the concept of the “thing-in-itself,”
47
Hegel, IPWH, 51, 52, 53.
Lauer, in Hegel: l’esprit absolu, 101. Lauer adds in this vein: “You certainly had the two schools —
the one of which, the Rationalist School, said he had too much of God, and the other, the Revisionist
School, said he didn’t have enough God. I suppose my temptation here is to say he had just the right
amount, but amount is not the operative term here.” (Lauer, Hegel: l’esprit absolu, 105)
49
Charles Taylor insists on this as well, writing that Hegel’s “idea of God is very hard to grasp and state
coherently — if indeed it ultimately is coherent — because it cannot fit certain readily available
categories in which we think of God and the world.” Taylor calls Hegel’s God a “Munchausen God,”
referring to the incident in which Baron Munchausen “extricated himself [from a swamp] by seizing his
own hair and heaving himself back on his horse.” (Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society, 38, 39)
50
Lauer, in Hegel: l’esprit absolu, 104.
48
77
reminiscent of Plato’s “forms.” But Hegel intended to unify the metaphysical with the
natural and express the nature of reality as it had been revealed to him.
Hegel’s God, according to Charles Taylor, is more than the collective Spirit of human
beings, but humans do constitute a “vehicle” for God’s realisation — a realisation that
requires the medium of finite spirits. Taylor interprets Hegel to mean that the “rest” of
God’s substance is the “spiritual reality underlying the universe as a whole.” Taylor also
insists God is not merely immanent in man for Hegel, but fails to define the
aforementioned “spiritual reality” (a difficult task, admittedly) except to say that God is
not entirely “independent” from man in Hegel’s scheme.51 Taylor specifies:
A conception of cosmic Spirit of this kind, if we can make sense of it, is the only
one which can square the circle, as it were — which can provide the basis of a
union between finite and cosmic Spirit which meets the requirement that man be
united to the whole and yet not sacrifice his own self-consciousness and
autonomous will.52
Taylor explains that God is self-positing, that God, “the subject who is necessarily
embodied and whose embodiment is both the condition of his existence and the
expression of what he is,” cannot be separated from that expression, “which is
coterminous with the conditions of existence.” No part of God’s expression “is just
given.”53
This is where Frederick C. Beiser is partly mistaken in his assessment of Hegel’s
religious views. Beiser argues that for Hegel, “Spirit is only the highest degree of
organisation and development of the organic powers within nature.” This statement is
accurate, except for the word “only,” the use of which is pivotal. Beiser continues:
If it were anything more, Hegel would relapse into the very dualism he condemns
in Kant and Fichte. It is noteworthy that this materialistic element to Hegel’s
51
Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society, 11, 26.
Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society, 11. Taylor adds that “[l]ike finite subjects, the absolute subject must
go through a cycle, a drama, in which it suffers division in order to return to unity.” (Taylor, Hegel and
Modern Society, 41)
53
Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society, 38.
52
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metaphysics was not lost on his contemporaries, who were quick to praise and
damn him accordingly.54
This second statement is objectionable because Hegel is not a materialist in any real or
traditional sense of the term. To call Hegel a materialist is as silly as to call him a
transcendentalist; it is to ignore that Hegel was seeking to unify the abstract with the
concrete; it is merely to reduce the abstract to the concrete, which Hegel could have done
very easily without his complex and precarious system of philosophy. For Hegel to argue
that the abstract must be “actualised” and “realised” through action55 is not for him to
equate ideas with action.
Hegel does say that Spirit is abstract until it is actualised through the “will, the
activity of mankind in the world at large,” but this actualisation will be one that unites
man with something that is greater than him. Beiser reduces this notion of the “I that is a
We and the We that is an I” to some vague identification “with the social whole.”56 It is
strange that Hegel, whose distaste for sentimentality is well known, could be seen to have
built a whole system merely to end it with the kind of “identification with the social
whole” that some of the standpoints throughout the Phenomenology of Spirit include
anyway.57 Hegel is uncovering the hard “science” of philosophy and the path to
comprehended History, not a soft notion of universal politico-cultural allegiance.
As far as Hegel’s contemporaries are concerned, it is true that they were quick to
condemn and praise him, but as Laurence Dickey points out, his contemporaries were
often Lutheran pietists58 like Schleiermacher, whose transcendentalist views Hegel
reviled, or theological rationalists who intended to base religion on human anthropology
(a kind of reductionism Hegel referred to as “twaddle”). Hegel was adamant that
54
Frederick C. Beiser, Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. Frederick C. Beiser
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 9.
55
Beiser, 291.
56
Beiser, 292.
57
Hegel’s portrayal of the “Ethical Order,” with its association to the Greeks and to the works of
Sophocles, stands as a case in point. (Hegel, PhG, §444-483).
58
Hegel referred to some of these people as the “inane priests in Berlin.” (Laurence Dickey, “Hegel on
Religion and Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. Frederick C. Beiser (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), 309)
79
“speculative philosophy had no intention of replacing either God with man, Christianity
with atheism, or Lutheranism with speculative philosophy.” Hegel argued “that ‘the
substance’ of the Christian religion and his philosophy were ‘the same.’” He defined the
difference between religion and philosophy as the difference between “believing” and
“knowing.” Dickey suggests that Hegel, in the tradition of many Christian thinkers
before him, “aimed at making philosophy the agent for expanding Christian pistis into
Christian gnosis.” Hegel’s problem, according to Dickey, was that the middle ground
between revolutionary French principles and reactionary evangelical principles that he
sought to promote was losing its audience, which “was vanishing precisely because of the
religio-political polarisation that Hegel’s philosophy was designed to arrest.”59
On his part, Beiser suggests Hegel “prohibits hypostasising his concept of Spirit,”
pointing to Hegel’s “adherence to the Aristotelian dictum that universals exist only in re.”
In order to prove this, Beiser uses one example from Hegel’s Encyclopedia that describes
animals as something “not to be found,” something “determinate.”60 But this does not
relate at all to Hegel’s notion of Revelation as developed in the reason of man, nor does it
take into account the special nature of Spirit as something that, as Taylor has pointed out,
must precisely be found. What some would consider the “mystical” aspect of Hegel’s
philosophy is in fact Hegel’s insistence that what is “given” by nature is not all that is
important. What is also important is man’s role, insofar as it relates to the capacity for
reason, and to his search for unification with the divine.61
What Herder and Hegel could not imagine is the way in which their organic, holistic,
and spiritual approach to the understanding of history would open the gates for the
59
Ibid., 302, 304, 324, 309, 310, 311.
Beiser, “Hegel’s Historicism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, 290-291.
61
In Dickey’s words, “the ‘methodical procedure’ that raises philosophy to the level of science also triggers
for Hegel a process whereby man becomes increasingly conscious of his religious telos.” (Dickey, 308)
He adds later: “Hegel’s pedagogic agenda emphasised that the aim of speculative philosophy was to
remind men of the religious dimension of their nature. For Hegel, grounding human nature in religion
enabled him to show men that they were spiritual beings rather than ‘merely’ natural ones.” (Dickey, 307)
Alan Patten, who can hardly be accused of over-emphasising the metaphysical dimension of Hegel’s
thought, has pointed out that “the civic humanist reading” of Hegel “cannot stand entirely on its own.”
Patten suspects that upon being questioned explicitly about the role of man in history, Hegel would “fall
back” on an interpretation of history that highlights God’s plan. (Alan Patten, Hegel’s Idea of Freedom
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 204)
60
80
atheist, materialistic, and existentialist philosophies of the modern age. Where Hegel and
(sometimes) Herder link divine and human purposes in an attempt to approach the one
and elevate the other, modern philosophers will ask why God is necessary at all for the
understanding of human existence. After an orgy of Nietzschian abandon in which good
and evil were estimated to have been superseded, philosophers recalled the problem of
morality, and realised that a moral scheme without God meant a return to the purest slate
of philosophy, along with a palpable emptiness in the abode of the Spirit that had been
inhabited since prehistory. Morality can, of course, exist without the “idea” of God, just
as morality under the God of the Judeo-Christian faith, for instance, has shifted
inexorably throughout the centuries. But the modern ethos arises not only from the
relativist, rationalist, and nationalist strands of Herder’s and Hegel’s thought, but from
their faith itself, and from their last attempt to link heaven and earth, metaphysics and
science, before the power would be wrested from the clerics by the men of science, and
the slight filaments still floating between Heaven and Earth would be swept away as
cobwebs adorning a newly disenchanted world.
81
CONCLUSION
Michael N. Forster, in the introduction to his collection of Herder’s works, writes:
“Hegel’s philosophy turns out to be an elaborate systematic extension of Herderian ideas
(especially concerning God, the mind, and history).”1 Indeed, as this thesis demonstrates,
the seeds of Hegel’s philosophy are contained within Herder’s writings, although Hegel
constructs a self-contained and cohesive system out of some of these seedlings, while
Herder’s texts themselves are more self-contradictory.
Herder’s philosophy introduces a vision of societies and cultures centred on their own
happiness but nonetheless connected by a great chain: the chain of the development of
the natural world, of world history, and of the fleeting human earthly experience, as set in
motion by the impetus and source of all life, God. Herder’s concern for the survival of
German culture and for the reconciliation of science and faith, of the human and the
divine, of the multifarious and at once seamless nature of existence, leads to a philosophy
of history that breaks the boundaries of orthodoxy, and that simultaneously challenges the
new philosophies that are in some sense just as close-minded and self-congratulatory as
the orthodoxies of the past.
Herder’s care not to neglect the particular was formative for Hegel’s Phenomenology,
as was Herder’s refusal to judge epochs and cultures by a universal standard, and his
insistence that the human experience with its natural and spiritual elements constitutes
1
Michael N. Forster, Introduction to J.G. Herder, Philosophical Writings, trans. Michael N. Forster
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), vii.
82
one whole piece. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit takes up many of Herder’s concerns
and explains the completeness of the human experience in a way that evokes the
influential analytical method of Freud, and places more of history’s burden on the
shoulders of humanity. Hegel turns the historical experience into a high science the
proper practise of which will liberate man and permit him to know his own origins in the
only way that is possible. In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the chain of history is
portrayed as it is linked to the greater chain of human consciousness and anchored in the
dark leagues of the ocean of Spirit. Hegel will be Cousteau and, with the clear thought of
“science” and interest in the organic elements of life, will take the study of philosophy
right to the depths of its meaning.
Rouché understands that “[Herder’s] philosophy of history illuminates itself not only
by the influences that it felt, but by those that it exerted.”2 The contradictions that arose
in Herder’s complex thought seem to have sparked in their collision the ideas Hegel
expresses with so much ardour. The “science” of philosophy as expressed in Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit is like an inversion of the allegory of the cave in Plato’s
Republic.3 It is not a question of seeking answers outside of the world in order to bring
them down from on high, but rather a question of looking right to the bottom of things to
find how they came about. It provides inspiration for the organic and pantheistic
orientation of the Romantic thinkers; but it is also deeply bound up with the philosophy
of Herder, who criticised all at once the Enlightenment, the Christian orthodoxy, and the
secularisation of Christianity to which he unwittingly contributed.
Karl Löwith has said that Hegel was the “last Christian philosopher.”4 Herder was
the second-last, then, before a new ethos materialised that would bring about a different
world, and new reasons to encourage the proper comprehension of history. While, at the
2
Rouché, 598.*
Beiser remarks: “Hegel was taking issue with the Platonic tradition of philosophy, which had been
responsible for so much of the a-historicism of the history of philosophy.” (Beiser, “Hegel’s Historicism,”
in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, 276)
4
Dickey, “Hegel on Religion and Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, 302. Löwith also
had it that Hegel’s understanding of the “progression from the abstract to the concrete” was one that
“makes him a philosopher whose conception of secularisation was fully Christian in character.” (Ibid.,
331)
3
83
surface, both thinkers can be linked on the “chain” to National Socialism, or to
Communism, they were in fact antagonistic towards the empty secular and rationalist
strands of thought that would lead to these political movements. They were also critical
of the overt secularisation of Christianity that was occurring even in their day, but in fact
contributed to its fruition through their belief in Revelation, which sprang from the
optimistic view they held of the human capacity for reason.
Although Herder’s commitment to a transcendent God ultimately outweighed his
interest in promoting the potential of human beings to represent God “immanently,”
Hegel’s commitment to a transcendent God is more easily overlooked. The
“immanence” implied in Hegel’s dialectical process makes Hegel’s work more
vulnerable to those who wish to deny the transcendent in philosophy. The fact that
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is intertwined with the stages of cognition and
culminates in a materialised absolute Knowing makes it fodder for those who would
discount the spiritual foundation of this very Phenomenology. Hegel’s “cold march of
necessity” has the echo of Marxist thought, while his warning to the philosophers of the
Romantic age not to uphold an “intensity without content,” “sheer force without spread,”
and “an empty depth,” accompanies Hegel’s conviction that these last have surrendered
themselves “to the uncontrolled ferment of the [divine] Substance.”5
However, it is Marx more than any philosopher who would draw Hegel’s scorn for
wishing “to be edifying” in the most fundamental sense. Hegel warns with equal dismay
against “an extension of substance that pours forth as a finite multiplicity without the
force to hold the multiplicity together.” Those who turn Hegel into a materialist forget
conveniently that although “Spirit has broken with the world it has hitherto inhabited and
imagined, and is of a mind to submerge it in the past,” it is nonetheless Spirit that
continues on, “never at rest but always engaged in moving forward,” to bring the
Phenomenology to its finale. They forget that without Spirit, the entire panoply of
5
Hegel, PhG, §7-10.
84
visions Hegel presents collapses, and, as Hegel would put it, “is in no way
distinguishable from superficiality.”6
Herder and Hegel positioned themselves in relation to the philosophers of their own
time, and Hegel positioned himself partly against Herder’s more traditional view of
religion. But Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is suffused with the tone and character of
Herder’s Another Philosophy of History, though it is a work of a different format and
largely of a different content as well. Herder’s influence on Hegel may not have been
foremost in Hegel’s mind as he wrote, but it is unmistakable to the reader of both these
texts today.
In contemporary times, one of the greatest concerns of the Occidental world is the
question of whether democracy can be, or should be, brought to other parts of the world.
Plato’s conviction that democracy was the second-worst form of government, because it
leads so easily to demagoguery and to the worst form of government (tyranny), is not a
conviction shared by philosophers of the current age. Whether democracy is in fact so
bad, particularly in countries where vast swaths of the population are educated enough to
know when to take their governments “to the cleaners,” is one question. What is more
relevant is the issue of whether it is suitable to impress democracy on nations that
otherwise might not embrace it.
Herder’s contention that nations find happiness on their own centre would seem to
answer this question negatively, while his hope that “Humanität” might spread would
answer it positively. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit suggests that careful reasoning
and the proper practise of philosophy is universal, and that what conclusions work for
one human group must work for another. But if the Phenomenology is considered as an
educational tract for those who care to understand history properly, it is implied that its
conclusions will not be universal; they will merely come to fruition in the minds of
Hegel’s students.
6
Hegel, PhG, §9-11.
85
What both philosophers agree on is the fact that history develops organically: this
would suggest that nations are not impermeable, monolithic entities. If so, to hope for the
spread of “Humanität” is perhaps not misplaced, especially in light of the way in which
scientific research and sociological study has been affecting people’s perceptions of
themselves and their interactions: it is no longer considered sensible or useful to punish
felons capitally, for instance, in most of the states in the Occidental world. At the same
time, a humane perception of others and the attendant humane treatment of people by
governments cannot be imposed on groups that are not developing that perception
“organically.” That is to say that governments of nations like China, while they could not
have been forced to develop a concern for “humaneness,” might very well be able to
arrive at such a concern if their dignity and self-reliance remain intact throughout the
process.
Lastly, the question of Education is a vital one throughout both Herder and Hegel’s
works. Herder insists that the underlying dynamic of human history is a gently
progressing process of Education by God, or by Providence, while Hegel considers
history by assessing its process of sub-conscious learning, and offers this process as
evidence that philosophy, well considered and well taught, can open minds and
strengthen spirit absolutely.
The ultimate education is one that leads minds to avoid religious fanaticism on the
one hand, and moral relativism (in which religion is considered to be embarrassing) on
the other. Religious views must be tempered by a literary and aesthetic concern that
respects the value of analogy and metaphor, that rejects the pedantry of word-for-word
interpretations, and, most importantly, that seeks out core messages, emphasising these
messages over and against the smaller, paradoxical statements that are found in primary
texts like the Bible. Historiography must be used in assessing texts insofar as their
authors may have had important motives for making certain statements to an intended
audience, within a specific context.
86
Similarly, relativism hampers rather than enhances the imagination. Although
religious and cultural factors sometimes divide, they have the potential to unify. When
emphasis is placed on the core messages of the great religions of the world, it is clear that
they resemble each other in important ways. The modern tendency to shirk specific
religious and cultural content leaves an empty void where fanaticism can prevail. The
spiritual realm, conceived from the boundaries of any given religious perspective, is a
unified place. It is at once a richly diverse place, where revelations occur throughout
history from different sides, as though various curtains were being pulled back onto the
same centre from all angles. It is a mistake to devalue the core, in relativism as in
religious or cultural fanaticism. The core is often best expressed through the contingent,
earthly, and specific religions and cultures that span history and the world.
While the scientific and objective elements of education can never be undervalued,
and the great theories and daily lessons of science are vital unifying factors in the world,
the religious, literary, musical, and linguistic component of education should never be
neglected. The “musaïc sciences,” as they might be called, provide an important outlet
for the emotional and spiritual processes of human existence, refining the emotions and
moderating the expenditure of spiritual energy.
This thesis has offered a counterweight to Berlin’s interpretation of Herder as a
relativist thinker, and has shown how Hegel’s work cannot be thought of exclusively in
terms of rationalist or traditionalist reasoning. This thesis has demonstrated the
significance of the religious content in Herder’s and Hegel’s work, and has shown how
this content is relevant for political thought and indispensable for the accurate
interpretation of these thinkers. This thesis has traced the ways in which Herder as a
moderate is connected to Hegel as a moderate. This thesis was written with a view to
strengthening moderateness in general, the weakness of which in the face of vigorous
extremism represents a natural disadvantage. If philosophers aimed “to edify,” as
religious and relativist fanatics do, and “dourness” were eradicated from philosophy,
man’s full potential as a creature of God gifted with reason would be impossible to attain.
87
The lessons gleaned from Herder’s and Hegel’s philosophies of history might well be
expressed thus: Consider humaneness to be a potential characteristic of all human
beings; do not impose your vision of it, however, on others, but lead by example; and
finally, promote everywhere and in every way the concept of a good, gentle, but efficient
and well-rounded Education.
88
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